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THE WORKS OF 

HENRY VAN DYKE 

AVALON EDITION 
VOLUME XVII 

COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 





COMPANIONABLE 

BOOKS 


BY 

HENRY VAN DYKE 


“ What is this reading, which I must learn,” asked Adam, 

“ and what is it like? ” 

“ It is something beyond gardening,” answered Raphael, 
“and at times you will find it a heavy task. But at its best 
it will be like listening through your eyes ; and you shall hear 
the flowers laugh, the trees talk, and the stars sing.” 

Solomon Singlewitz, The Life of Adam. 



3 5 3 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 

1922 

2 > 






Copyright , 1922, by Charles Scribner’s Sons 


Copyright , 1920, by Harper Brothers 




Gift 

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DEC 11 *22 


MAXWELL STRUTHERS BURT 

AUTHOR AND RANCHMAN 
ONCE MY SCHOLAR 
ALWAYS MY FRIEND 








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PREFACE 


Many books are dry and dusty, there is no 
juice in them; and many are soon exhausted, 
you would no more go back to them than to a 
squeezed orange; but some have in them an 
unfailing sap, both from the tree of knowledge 
and from the tree of life. 

By companionable books I mean those that 
are worth taking with you on a journey, where 
the weight of luggage counts, or keeping beside 
your bed, near the night-lamp; books that will 
bear reading often, and the more slowly you 
read them the better you enjoy them; books 
that not only tell you how things look and how 
people behave, but also interpret nature and 
life to you, in language of beauty and power 
touched with the personality of the author, so 
that they have a real voice audible to your 
spirit in the silence. 

Here I have written about a few of these 
books which have borne me good company, in 
one way or another, — and about their authors, 
who have put the best of themselves into their 
work. Such criticism as the volume contains 
vii 


PREFACE 


is therefore mainly in the form of appreciation 
with reasons for it. The other kind of criticism 
you will find chiefly in the omissions. 

So (changing the figure to suit this cabin by 
the sea) I send forth my new ship, hoping only 
that it may carry something desirable from each 
of the ports where it has taken on cargo, and 
that it may not be sunk by the enemy before 
it touches at a few friendly harbours. 

Henry van Dyke. 

Sylvanora, 

Seal Harbour , Me., 

August 19 , 1922 . 


viii 


CONTENTS 


I. 

The Book of Books 

1 

II. 

Poetry in the Psalms 

29 

III. 

The Good Enchantment of Charles 
Dickens 

57 

IV. 

Thackeray and Real Men 

95 

V. 

George Eliot and Real Women 

119 

VI. 

The Poet of Immortal Youth 

(Keats) 

149 

VII. 

The Recovery of Joy 

(Wordsworth) 

171 

VIII. 

“The Glory of the Imperfect” 

(Browning) 

211 

IX. 

A Quaint Comrade by Quiet Streams 

(Walton) 

261 

X. 

A Sturdy Believer 

(Samuel Johnson) 

277 

XI. 

A Puritan Plus Poetry 

(Emerson) 

301 

XII. 

An Adventurer in a Velvet Jacket 

(Stevenson) 

323 







THE BOOK OF BOOKS 





THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

An Apologue 

nnHERE was once an Eastern prince who was 
A much enamoured of the art of gardening. 
He wished that all flowers delightful to the eye, 
and all fruits pleasant to the taste and good for 
food, should grow in his dominion, and that in 
growing the flowers should become more fair, 
the fruits more savoury and nourishing. With 
this thought in his mind and this desire in his 
heart, he found his way to the Ancient One, the 
Worker of Wonders who dwells in a secret 
place, and made known his request. 

“For the care of your gardens and your 
orchards,” said the Ancient One, “I can do 
nothing, since that charge has been given to you 
and to your people. Nor will I send blossom- 
ing plants and fruiting trees of every kind to 
make your kingdom rich and beautiful as by 
magic, lest the honour of labour should be 
diminished, and the slow reward of patience 
despised, and even the living gifts bestowed 
upon you without toil should wither and die 
away. But this will I do: a single tree shall be 
3 


COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 


brought to you from a far country by the hands 
of my servants, and you shall plant it in the 
midst of your land. In the body of that tree is 
the sap of life that was from the beginning; the 
leaves of it are full of healing; its flowers never 
fail, and its fruitage is the joy of every season. 
The roots of the tree shall go down to the 
springs of deep waters; and wherever its pollen 
is drifted by the wind or borne by the bees, the 
gardens shall put on new beauty; and wherever 
its seed is carried by the fowls of the air, the 
orchards shall yield a richer harvest. But the 
tree itself you shall guard and cherish and keep 
as I give it you, neither cutting anything away 
from it, nor grafting anything upon it; for the 
life of the tree is in all the branches, and the 
other trees shall be glad because of it.” 

As the Ancient One had spoken, so it came to 
pass. The land of that prince had great renown 
of fine flowers and delicious fruits, ever unfold- 
ing in new colours and sweeter flavours the life 
that was shed among them by the tree of trees. 

I 

Something like the marvel of this tale may be 
read in the history of the Bible. No other book 
in the world has had such a strange vitality, 
4 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

such an outgoing power of influence and inspi- 
ration. Not only has it brought to the countries 
in whose heart it has been set new ideals of civi- 
lization, new models of character, new concep- 
tions of virtue and hopes of happiness; but it 
has also given new impulse and form to the 
shaping imagination of man, and begotten 
beauty in literature and the other arts. 

Suppose, for example, that it were possible to 
dissolve away all the works of art which clearly 
owe their being to thoughts, emotions, or vi- 
sions derived from the Bible, — all sculpture like 
Donatello’s “ David” and Michelangelo’s 
“Moses”; all painting like Raphael’s “Sistine 
Madonna” and Murillo’s “Holy Family”; all 
music like Bach’s “Passion” and Handel’s 
“Messiah”; all poetry like Dante’s “Divine 
Comedy” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” — how 
it would impoverish the world ! 

The literary influence of the Bible appears the 
more wonderful when we consider that it is the 
work of a race not otherwise potent or famous 
in literature. We do not know, of course, what 
other books may have come from the Jewish 
nation and vanished with whatever of power or 
beauty they possessed; but in those that remain 
there is little of exceptional force or charm for 
readers outside of the Hebrew race. They have 
5 


COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 

no broad human appeal, no universal signifi- 
cance, not even any signal excellence of form 
and imagery. Josephus is a fairly good historian, 
sometimes entertaining, but not comparable to 
Herodotus or Thucydides or Tacitus or Gibbon. 
The Talmuds are vast storehouses of things new 
and old, where a careful searcher may now and 
then find a legendary gem or a quaint fragment 
of moral tapestry. In histories of mediaeval 
literature, Ibn Ezra of Toledo and Rashi of 
Lunel are spoken of with respect. In modern 
letters, works as far apart as the philosophical 
treatises of Spinoza and the lyrics of Heinrich 
Heine have distinction in their kind. No one 
thinks that the Hebrews are lacking in great 
and varied talents; but how is it that in world- 
literature their only contribution that counts is 
the Bible? And how is it that it counts so 
immensely? 

It is possible to answer by saying that in the 
Old Testament we have a happily made collec- 
tion of the best things in the ancient literature 
of the Jews, and in the New Testament we have 
another anthology of the finest of the narratives 
and letters which were produced by certain 
writers of the same race under a new and ex- 
ceedingly powerful spiritual impulse. The Bible 
is excellent because it contains the cream of 
6 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

Hebrew thought. But this answer explains 
nothing. It only restates the facts in another 
form. How did the cream rise? How did such 
a collection come to be made? What gives it 
unity and coherence underneath all its diversity? 
How is it that, as a clear critic has well said, 
“These sixty books, with all their varieties of 
age, authorship, literary form, are, when prop- 
erly arranged, felt to draw together with a unity 
like the connectedness of a dramatic plot?” 

There is an answer, which if it be accepted, 
carries with it a solution of the problem. 

Suppose a race chosen by some process of 
selection (which need not now be discussed or 
defined) to develop in its strongest and most 
absolute form that one of man’s faculties which 
is called the religious sense, to receive most 
clearly and deeply the impression of the unity, 
spirituality, and righteousness of a Supreme 
Being present in the world. Imagine that race 
moving through a long and varied experience 
under this powerful impression, now loyal to it, 
now rebelling against it, now misinterpreting it, 
now led by the voice of some prophet to under- 
stand it more fully and feel it more profoundly, 
but never wholly losing it for a single generation. 
Imagine the history of that race, its poetry, the 
biography of its famous men and women, the 
7 


COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 


messages of its moral reformers, conceived and 
written in constant relation to that strongest 
factor of conscious life, the sense of the presence 
and power of the Eternal. 

Suppose, now, in a time of darkness and hu- 
miliation, that there rises within that race a 
prophet who declares that a new era of spiritual 
light has come, preaches a new revelation of the 
Eternal, and claims in his own person to fulfil 
the ancient hopes and promises of a divine 
deliverer and redeemer. Imagine his followers, 
few in number, accepting his message slowly 
and dimly at first, guided by companionship 
with him into a clearer understanding and a 
stronger belief, until at last they are convinced 
that his claims are true, and that he is the 
saviour not only of the chosen people, but also 
of the whole world, the revealer of the Eternal 
to mankind. Imagine these disciples setting 
out with incredible courage to carry this mes- 
sage to all nations, so deeply impressed with its 
truth that they are supremely happy to suffer 
and die for it, so filled with the passion of its 
meaning that they dare attempt to remodel the 
life of the world with it. Suppose a human 
story like this underneath the writing of the 
books which are gathered in the Bible, and you 
have an explanation — it seems to me the only 
8 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

reasonable explanation — of their surpassing qual- 
ity and their strange unity. 

This story is not a mere supposition: its gen- 
eral outline, stated in these terms, belongs to 
the realm of facts which cannot reasonably be 
questioned. What more is needed to account 
for the story itself, what potent and irresistible 
reality is involved in this record of experience, 
I do not now ask. This is not an estimate of 
the religious authority of the Bible, nor of its 
inspiration in the theological sense of that word, 
but only of something less important, though 
no less real — its literary influence. 

II 

The fountain-head of the power of the Bible 
in literature lies in its nearness to the very 
springs and sources of human life — life taken 
seriously, earnestly, intensely; life in its broadest 
meaning, including the inward as well as the 
outward; life interpreted in its relation to uni- 
versal laws and eternal values. It is this vital 
quality in the narratives, the poems, the alle- 
gories, the meditations, the discourses, the let- 
ters, gathered in this book, that gives it first 
place among the books of the world not only for 
currency, but also for greatness. 

9 


COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 

For the currency of literature depends in the 
long run upon the breadth and vividness of its 
human appeal. And the greatness of literature 
depends upon the intensive significance of those 
portions of life which it depicts and interprets. 
Now, there is no other book which reflects so 
many sides and aspects of human experience as 
the Bible, and this fact alone would suffice to 
give it a world-wide interest and make it popu- 
lar. But it mirrors them all, whether they be- 
long to the chronicles of kings and conquerors, 
or to the obscure records of the lowliest of la- 
bourers and sufferers, in the light of a conviction 
that they are all related to the will and purpose 
of the Eternal. This illuminates every figure 
with a divine distinction, and raises every event 
to the n\h power of meaning. It is this fact 
that gives the Bible its extraordinary force as 
literature and makes it great. 

Born in the East and clothed in Oriental form 
and imagery , the Bible walks the ways of all the 
world with familiar feet and enters land after land 
to find its own everywhere. It has learned to 
speak in hundreds of languages to the heart of 
man. It comes into the palace to tell the monarch 
that he is a servant of the Most High , and into the 
cottage to assure the peasant that he is a son of 
God. Children listen to its stories with wonder 
and delight , and wise men ponder them as parables 
10 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

of life . It has a word of peace for the time of 
peril, a word of comfort for the day of calamity , a 
word of light for the hour of darkness . Its oracles 
are repeated in the assembly of the people , and its 
counsels whispered in the ear of the lonely . The 
wicked and the proud tremble at its warning , but 
to the wounded and the penitent it has a mother's 
voice . The wilderness and the solitary place have 
been made glad by it, and the fire on the hearth 
has lit the reading of its well-worn page . It has 
woven itself into our deepest affections and col- 
oured our dearest dreams; so that love and friend- 
ship, sympathy and devotion, memory and hope, 
put on the beautiful garments of its treasured 
speech, breathing of frankincense and myrrh . 

Above the cradle and beside the grave its great 
words come to us uncalled. They fill our prayers 
with power larger than we know, and the beauty of 
them lingers on our ear long after the sermons 
which they adorned have been forgotten. They 
return to us swiftly and quietly, like doves flying 
from far away. They surprise us with new 
meanings, like springs of water breaking forth 
from the mountain beside a long-trodden path. 
They grow richer, as pearls do when they are worn 
near the heart. 

No man is poor or desolate who has this trea- 
sure for his own. When the landscape darkens 
and the trembling pilgrim comes to the Valley 

11 


COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 


named of the Shadow , he is not afraid to enter: 
he takes the rod and staff of Scripture in his 
hand; he says to friend and comrade , “ Good-by ; 
we shall meet again and comforted by that sup- 
port, he goes toward the lonely pass as one who 
walks through darkness into light . 

It would be strange indeed if a book which 
has played such a part in human life had not 
exercised an extraordinary influence upon liter- 
ature. As a matter of fact, the Bible has called 
into existence tens of thousands of other books 
devoted to the exposition of its meaning, the 
defense and illustration of its doctrine, the ap- 
plication of its teaching, or the record of its 
history. The learned Fabricius, in the early 
part of the eighteenth century, published a cata- 
logue raisonne of such books, filling seven hun- 
dred quarto pages.* Since that time the length 
of the list has probably more than trebled. In 
addition, we must reckon the many books of 
hostile criticism and contrary argument which 
the Bible has evoked, and which are an evidence 
of revolt against the might of its influence. 
All this tangle of Biblical literature has grown 
up around it like a vast wood full of all manner 
of trees, great and small, useful and worthless, 

* Syllabus Scriptorum Veterum Recentiumque qu iV eritatem Religionis 
Christiana Asseruerunt: Hamburg, 1725. 

12 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

fruit-trees, timber-trees, berry-bushes, briers, 
and poison-vines. But all of them, even the 
most beautiful and tall, look like undergrowth, 
when we compare them with the mighty oak of 
Scripture, towering in perennial grandeur, the 
father of the forest. 

Among the patristic writers there were some 
of great genius like Origen and Chrysostom and 
Augustine. The mediaeval schools of theology 
produced men of philosophic power, like Anselm 
and Thomas Aquinas; of spiritual insight, 
like the author of the Imitatio Christi, The 
eloquence of France reached its height in the 
discourses of Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Massil- 
lon. German became one of the potent tongues 
of literature when Martin Luther used it in his 
tracts and sermons, and Herder’s Geist der he - 
braischen Poesie is one of the great books in criti- 
cism. In English, to mention such names as 
Hooker and Fuller and Jeremy Taylor is to 
recall the dignity, force, and splendour of prose 
at its best. Yet none of these authors has 
produced anything to rival the book from which 
they drew their common inspiration. 

In the other camp, though there have been 
many brilliant assailants, not one has surpassed, 
or even equalled, in the estimation of the world, 
the literary excellence of the book which they 
13 


COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 

attacked. The mordant wit of Voltaire, the 
lucid and melancholy charm of Renan, have 
not availed to drive or draw the world away 
from the Bible; and the effect of all assaults 
has been to leave it more widely read, better 
understood, and more intelligently admired 
than ever before. 

Now it must be admitted that the same thing 
is true, at least in some degree, of other books 
which are held to be sacred or quasi-sacred : 
they are superior to the distinctively theologi- 
cal literature which has grown up about them. 
I suppose nothing of the Mussulmans is as great 
as the “Koran,” nothing of the Hindus as great 
as the “Vedas”; and though the effect of the 
Confucian classics, from the literary point of 
view, may not have been altogether good, their 
supremacy in the religious library of the Chi- 
nese is unquestioned. But the singular and 
noteworthy thing about the influence of the 
Bible is the extent to which it has permeated 
general literature, the mark which it has made 
in all forms of belles-lettres. To treat this sub- 
ject adequately one would need to write vol- 
umes. In this chapter I can touch but briefly 
on a few points of the outline as they come out 
in English literature. 


14 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 


III 

In the Old-English period, the predominant 
influence of the Scriptures may be seen in the 
frequency with which the men of letters turned 
to them for subjects, and in the Biblical colour- 
ing and texture of thought and style. Csed- 
mon’s famous “Hymn” and the other poems 
like “Genesis,” “Exodus,” “Daniel,” and “Ju- 
dith,” which were once ascribed to him; Cyne- 
wulf’s “Crist,” “The Fates of the Apostles,” 
“The Dream of the Rood”; iElfric’s “Homi- 
lies” and his paraphrases of certain books of 
Scripture — these early fruits of our literature 
are all the offspring of the Bible. 

In the Middle-English period, that anony- 
mous masterpiece “Pearl” is full of the spirit 
of Christian mysticism, and the two poems 
called “Cleanness” and “Patience,” probably 
written by the same hand, are free and spirited 
versions of stories from the Bible. “The Vision 
of Piers the Plowman,” formerly ascribed to 
William Langland, but now supposed by some 
scholars to be the work of four or five different 
authors, was the most popular poem of the 
latter half of the fourteenth century. It is a 
vivid picture of the wrongs and sufferings of 
the labouring man, a passionate satire on the 
15 


COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 


corruptions of the age in church and state, an 
eloquent appeal for a return to truth and sim- 
plicity. The feeling and the imagery of Scrip- 
ture pervade it with a strange power and 
charm; in its reverence for poverty and toil it 
leans closely and confidently upon the example 
of Jesus; and at the end it makes its plough- 
man hero appear in some mystic way as a type, 
first of the crucified Saviour, and then of the 
church which is the body of Christ. 

It was about this time, the end of the four- 
teenth century, that John Wyclif and his dis- 
ciples, feeling the need of the support of the 
Bible in their work as reformers, took up and 
completed the task of translating it entirely 
into the English tongue of the common people. 
This rude but vigourous version was revised and 
improved by John Purvey. It rested mainly 
upon the Latin version of St. Jerome. At the 
beginning of the sixteenth century William 
Tindale made an independent translation of the 
New Testament from the original Greek, a 
virile and enduring piece of work, marked by 
strength and simplicity, and setting a standard 
for subsequent English translations. Cover- 
dale’s version of the Scriptures was published 
in 1535, and was announced as made “out of 
Douche and Latyn”; that is to say, it was 
16 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

based upon the German of Luther and the 
Zurich Bible, and upon the Vulgate of St. Je- 
rome; but it owed much to Tindale, to whose 
manly force it added a certain music of diction 
and grace of phrase which may still be noted 
in the Psalms as they are rendered in the Angli- 
can Prayer-Book. Another translation, marked 
by accurate scholarship, was made by English 
Puritans at Geneva, and still another, charac- 
terized by a richer Latinized style, was made 
by English Catholics living in exile at Rheims, 
and was known as “the Douai Version,” from 
the fact that it was first published in its com- 
plete form in that city in 1609-1610. 

Meantime, in 1604, a company of scholars 
had been appointed by King James I in Eng- 
land to make a new translation “out of the 
original tongues, and with the former transla- 
tions diligently compared and revised.” These 
forty-seven men had the advantage of all the 
work of their predecessors, the benefit of all 
the discussion over doubtful words and phrases, 
and the “unearned increment” of riches which 
had come into the English language since the 
days of Wyclif. The result of their labours, 
published in 1611, was the so-called “Author- 
ized Version,” a monument of English prose 
in its prime: clear, strong, direct, yet full of 
17 


COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 


subtle rhythms and strange colours; now mov- 
ing as simply as a shepherd’s song, in the 
Twenty-third Psalm; now marching with ma- 
jestic harmonies, in the book of Job; now re- 
flecting the lowliest forms of human life, in the 
Gospel stories; and now flashing with celestial 
splendours in the visions of the Apocalypse; 
vivid without effort; picturesque without ex- 
aggeration; sinewy without strain; capable 
alike of the deepest tenderness and the most 
sublime majesty; using a vocabulary of only 
six thousand words to build a book which, as 
Macaulay said, “if everything else in our lan- 
guage should perish, would alone suffice to show 
the whole extent of its beauty and power.” 

The literary excellence of this version, no 
doubt, did much to increase the influence of 
the Bible in literature and confirm its place 
as the central book in the life of those who 
speak and write the English tongue. Consider 
a few of the ways in which this influence may 
be traced. 


IV 

First of all, it has had a general effect upon 
English writing, helping to preserve it from the 
opposite faults of vulgarity and affectation. 
Coleridge long ago remarked upon the tendency 
18 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

of a close study of the Bible to elevate a writer’s 
style. There is a certain naturalness, inevi- 
tableness, propriety of form to substance, in 
the language of Scripture which communicates 
to its readers a feeling for the fitness of words; 
and this in itself is the first requisite of good 
writing. Sincerity is the best part of dignity. 

The English of our Bible is singularly free 
from the vice of preciosity: it is not far-sought, 
overnice, elaborate. Its plainness is a rebuk- 
ing contrast to all forms of euphuism. It does 
not encourage a direct imitation of itself; for 
the comparison between the original and the 
copy makes the latter look pale and dull. Even 
in the age which produced the authorized ver- 
sion, its style was distinct and remarkable. As 
Hallam has observed, it was “not the English 
of Daniel, of Baleigh, or Bacon.” It was 
something larger, at once more ancient and 
more modern, and therefore well fitted to be- 
come not an invariable model, but an endur- 
ing standard. Its words come to it from all 
sources; they are not chosen according to the 
foolish theory that a word of Anglo-Saxon 
origin is always stronger and simpler than a 
Latin derivative. Take the beginning of the 
Forty-sixth Psalm: 

“God is our refuge and strength, a very pres- 
19 


COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 


ent help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, 
though the earth be removed, and though the 
mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; 
though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, 
though the mountains shake with the swelling 
thereof.” 

Or take this passage from the Epistle to the 
Romans : 

“Be kindly affectioned one to another with 
brotherly love; in honour preferring one an- 
other; not slothful in business; fervent in 
spirit; serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope; 
patient in tribulation; continuing instant in 
prayer; distributing to the necessity of saints; 
given to hospitality.” 

Here is a style that adapts itself by instinct 
to its subject, and whether it uses Saxon words 
like “strength” and “help” and “love” and 
“hope,” or Latin words like “refuge” and 
“trouble” and “present” and “fervent” and 
“patient” and “prayer” and “hospitality,” 
weaves them into a garment worthy of the 
thought. 

The literary influence of a great, popular 
book written in such a style is both inspiring 
and conservative. It survives the passing 
modes of prose in each generation, and keeps 
the present in touch with the past. It pre- 
20 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

serves a sense of balance and proportion in a 
language whose perils lie in its liberties and in 
the indiscriminate use of its growing wealth. 
And finally it keeps a medium of communica- 
tion open between the learned and the simple; 
for the two places where the effect of the Bible 
upon the English language may be most clearly 
felt are in the natural speech of the plain people 
and in the finest passages of great authors. 

V 

Following this line of the influence of the 
Bible upon language as the medium of litera- 
ture, we find, in the next place, that it has con- 
tributed to our common speech a great num- 
ber of phrases which are current everywhere. 
Sometimes these phrases are used in a merely 
conventional way. They serve as counters in 
a long extemporaneous prayer, or as padding 
to a page of dull and pious prose. But at other 
times they illuminate the sentence with a new 
radiance; they clarify its meaning with a true 
symbol; they enhance its value with rich asso- 
ciations; they are “sweeter than honey and 
the honeycomb.” 

Take for example such phrases as these: “a 
good old age,” “the wife of thy bosom,” “the 
21 


COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 

apple of his eye,” “gathered to his fathers,” 
“a mother in Israel,” “a land flowing with 
milk and honey,” “the windows of heaven,” 
“the fountains of the great deep,” “living 
fountains of waters,” “the valley of decision,” 
“cometh up as a flower,” “a garden enclosed,” 
“one little ewe lamb,” “thou art the man,” 
“a still, small voice,” “as the sparks fly up- 
ward,” “swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,” 
“miserable comforters,” “the strife of tongues,” 
“the tents of Kedar,” “the cry of the humble,” 
“the lofty looks of man,” “the pride of life,” 
“from strength to strength,” “as a dream when 
one awaketh,” “the wings of the morning,” 
“stolen waters,” “a dinner of herbs,” “apples 
of gold in pictures of silver,” “better than 
rubies,” “a lion in the way,” “vanity of vani- 
ties,” “no discharge in that war,” “the little 
foxes that spoil the vines,” “terrible as an army 
with banners,” “precept upon precept, line up- 
on line,” “as a drop of a bucket,” “whose 
merchants are princes,” “trodden the wine- 
press alone,” “the rose of Sharon and the lily 
of the valley,” “the highways and hedges,” 
“the salt of the earth,” “the burden and heat 
of the day,” “the signs of the times,” “a pearl 
of great price,” “what God hath joined to- 
gether,” “the children of light,” “the powers 
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that be,” “if the trumpet give an uncertain 
sound,” “the fashion of this world,” “decently 
and in order,” “a thorn in the flesh,” “labour 
of love,” “a cloud of witnesses,” “to entertain 
angels unawares,” “faithful unto death,” “a 
crown of life.” Consider also those expres- 
sions which carry with them distinctly the 
memory of some ancient story: “the fleshpots 
of Egypt,” “manna in the wilderness,” “a mess 
of pottage,” “Joseph’s coat,” “the driving of 
Jehu,” “the mantle of Elijah,” “the widow’s 
mite,” “the elder brother,” “the kiss of Judas,” 
“the house of Martha,” “a friend of publicans 
and sinners,” “many mansions,” “bearing the 
cross.” Into such phrases as these, which are 
familiar to us all, the Bible has poured a wealth 
of meaning far beyond the measure of the bare 
words. They call up visions and reveal mys- 
teries. 

VI 

Direct, but not always accurate, quotations 
from Scripture and allusions to Biblical char- 
acters and events are very numerous in Eng- 
lish literature. They are found in all sorts of 
books. Professor Albert T. Cook has recently 
counted sixty-three in a volume of descriptive 
sketches of Italy, twelve in a book on wild 

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animals, and eighteen in a novel by Thomas 
Hardy. A special study of the Biblical refer- 
ences in Tennyson has been made,* and more 
than five hundred of them have been found. 

Bishop Charles Wordsworth has written a 
book on Shakespeare’s Knowledge and Use of 
the Bible ,f and shown “how fully and how ac- 
curately the general tenor of the facts recorded 
in the sacred narrative was present to his 
mind,” and “how Scriptural are the conceptions 
which Shakespeare had of the being and attri- 
butes of God, of His general and particular 
Providence, of His revelation to man, of our 
duty toward Him and toward each other, of 
human life and of human death, of time and of 
eternity.” It is possible that the bishop be- 
nevolently credits the dramatist with a more in- 
variable and complete orthodoxy than he pos- 
sessed. But certainly Shakespeare knew the 
Bible well, and felt the dramatic value of allu- 
sions and illustrations which were sure to be 
instantly understood by the plain people. It 
is his Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice , who 
remarks that “the Devil can cite Scripture for 
his purpose,” evidently referring to the Gospel 
story of the evil one who tried to tempt Jesus 
with a verse from the Psalms. 

* The Poetry of Tennyson. Scribner’s: New York, 1889-1920. 

f Smith, Elder & Co. ; London, 1880. 

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THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

The references to the Bible in the poetry of 
Robert Browning have been very carefully ex- 
amined by Mrs. Machen in an admirable little 
book.* It is not too much to say that his work 
is crowded with Scriptural quotations, allu- 
sions, and imagery. He follows Antonio’s max- 
im, and makes his bad characters, like Bishop 
Blougram and Sludge the Medium, cite from 
Holy Writ to cloak their hypocrisy or excuse 
their villainy. In his longest poem. The Ring 
and the Book , there are said to be more than five 
hundred Biblical references. 

But more remarkable even than the extent 
to which this material drawn from the Scrip- 
tures has been used by English writers, is the 
striking effect which it produces when it is well 
used. With what pathos does Sir Walter Scott, 
in The Heart of Midlothian , make old Davie 
Deans bow his head when he sees his daughter 
Effie on trial for her life, and mutter to him- 
self, “Ichabod! my glory is departed!” How 
magnificently does Ruskin enrich his Sesame 
and Lilies with that passage from Isaiah in 
which the fallen kings of Hades start from their 
thrones to greet the newly fallen with the cry, 
“Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou 
become like unto us?” How grandly do the 

* The Bible in Browning. Macmillan: New York, 1903. 

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images and thoughts of the last chapters of 
Deuteronomy roll through Kipling’s Recessional , 
with its Scriptural refrain, “Lest we forget!” 

There are some works of literature in English 
since the sixteenth century which are alto- 
gether Biblical in subject and colouring. Chief 
among these in prose is The Pilgrim's Progress 
of John Bunyan, and in verse, the Paradise 
Lost, Paradise Regained , and Samson Agonistes 
of John Milton. These are already classics. 
Some day a place near them will be given to 
Browning’s Saul and A Death in the Desert ; 
but for that we must wait until their form has 
stood the test of time. 

In general it may be observed — and the re- 
mark holds good of the works just mentioned 
— that a Scriptural story or poem is most likely 
to succeed when it takes its theme, directly or 
by suggestion, from the Bible, and carries it 
into a region of imagination, a border-realm, 
where the author is free to work without para- 
phrase or comparison with the sacred writers. 
It is for this reason that both Samson Agonistes 
and Paradise Lost are superior to Paradise 
Regained . 


26 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 


The largest and most important influence of 
the Bible in literature lies beyond all these vis- 
ible effects upon language and style and imagery 
and form. It comes from the strange power 
of the book to nourish and inspire, to mould 
and guide, the inner life of man. “ It finds 
me ” said Coleridge; and the word of the phi- 
losopher is one that the plain man can under- 
stand and repeat. 

The hunger for happiness which lies in every 
human heart can never be satisfied without 
righteousness; and the reason why the Bible 
reaches down so deep into the breast of man is 
because it brings news of a kingdom which is 
righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy 
Spirit. It brings this news not in the form of a 
dogma, a definition, a scientific statement, but 
in the form of literature, a living picture of 
experience, a perfect ideal embodied in a Char- 
acter and a Life. And because it does this, it 
has inspiration for those who write in the service 
of truth and humanity. 

The Bible has been the favourite book of 
those who were troubled and downtrodden, and 
of those who bore the great burden of a great 
task. New light has broken forth from it to 
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lead the upward struggle of mankind from age 
to age. Men have come back to it because 
they could not do without it. Nor will its influ- 
ence wane, its radiance be darkened, unless lit- 
erature ceases to express the noblest of human 
longings, the highest of human hopes, and 
mankind forgets all that is now incarnate in 
the central figure of the Bible, — the Divine De- 
liverer. 


28 


I 


POETRY IN THE PSALMS 






















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POETRY IN THE PSALMS 


HP HERE are three ways in which we may 
read the Bible. 

We may come to it as the divinely inspired 
rule of faith and conduct. This is the point of 
view from which it appears most precious to 
religion. It gives us the word of God to teach 
us what to believe and how to live. 

We may consider it as a collection of histori- 
cal books, written under certain conditions, and 
reflecting, in their contents and in their lan- 
guage, the circumstances in which they were 
produced. This is the aspect in which criticism 
regards the Bible; and its intellectual interest, 
as well as its religious value, is greatly enhanced 
by a clear vision of the truth about it from this 
point of view. 

We may study it also as literature. We may 
see in it a noble and impassioned interpretation 
of nature and life, uttered in language of beauty 
and sublimity, touched with the vivid colours 
of human personality, and embodied in forms 
of enduring literary art. 

None of these three ways of studying the 
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Bible is hostile to the others. On the contrary, 
they are helpful to one another, because each 
of them gives us knowledge of a real factor in 
the marvellous influence of the Bible in the 
world. 

The true lover of the Bible has an interest 
in all the elements of its life as an immortal 
book. He wishes to discern, and rightly to 
appreciate, the method of its history, the spirit 
of its philosophy, the significance of its fiction, 
the power of its eloquence, and the charm of 
its poetry. He wishes this all the more because 
he finds in it something which is not in any 
other book: a vision of God, a hope for man, 
and an inspiration to righteousness which seem 
to him divine. As the worshipper in the 
Temple would observe the art and structure of 
the carven beams of cedar and the lily-work on 
the tops of the pillars the more attentively be- 
cause they beautified the house of his God, so 
the man who has a religious faith in the Bible 
will study more eagerly and carefully the liter- 
ary forms of the book in which the Holy Spirit 
speaks forever. 

It is in this spirit that I wish to consider the 
poetical element in the Psalms. The com- 
fort, help, and guidance that they bring to our 
spiritual life will not be diminished, but in- 
32 


POETRY IN THE PSALMS 

creased, by a perception of their exquisite form 
and finish. If a king sent a golden cup full of 
cheering cordial to a weary man, he might well 
admire the two-fold bounty of the royal gift. 
The beauty of the vessel would make the 
draught more grateful and refreshing. And if 
the cup were inexhaustible, if it filled itself 
anew as often as it touched the lips, then the 
very shape and adornment of it would become 
significant and precious. It would be an ines- 
timable possession, a singing goblet, a treasure 
of life. 

John Milton, whose faith in religion was as 
exalted as his mastery of the art of poetry was 
perfect, has expressed in a single sentence the 
spirit in which I would approach the poetic 
study of the Book of Psalms: “Not in their 
divine arguments alone, but in the very critical 
art of composition, the Psalms may be easily 
made to appear over all kinds of lyric poetry 
incomparable.” 

I 

Let us remember at the outset that a consid- 
erable part of the value of the Psalms as poetry 
will lie beyond our reach. We cannot precisely 
measure it, nor give it full appreciation, simply 
because we are dealing with the Psalms only 
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as we have them in our English Bible. This 
is a real drawback; and it is well to understand 
clearly the two things that we lose in reading 
the Psalms in this way. 

First, we lose the beauty and the charm of 
verse. This is a serious loss. Poetry and verse 
are not the same thing, but they are so inti- 
mately related that it is difficult to divide them. 
Indeed, according to certain definitions of 
poetry, it would seem almost impossible. 

Yet who will deny that the Psalms as we 
have them in the English Bible are really and 
truly poetical? 

The only way out of this difficulty that I can 
see is to distinguish between verse as the formal 
element and imaginative emotion as the essen- 
tial element in poetry. In the original produc- 
tion of a poem, it seems to me, it is just to say 
that the embodiment in metrical language is a 
law of art which must be observed. But in the 
translation of a poem (which is a kind of reflec- 
tion of it in a mirror) the verse may be lost 
without altogether losing the spirit of the poem. 

Take an illustration from another art. A 
statue has the symmetry of solid form. You 
can look at it from all sides, and from every 
side you can see the balance and rhythm of the 
parts. In a photograph this solidity of form 
34 


POETRY IN THE PSALMS 

disappears. You see only a flat surface. But 
you still recognize it as the reflection of a statue. 

The Psalms were undoubtedly written, in 
the original Hebrew, according to a system of 
versification, and perhaps to some extent with 
forms of rhyme. 

The older scholars, like Lowth and Herder, 
held that such a system existed, but could not 
be recovered. Later scholars, like Ewald, 
evolved a system of their own. Modern schol- 
arship, represented by such authors as Pro- 
fessors Cheyne and Briggs, is reconstructing 
and explaining more accurately the Hebrew 
versification. But, for the present at least, 
the only thing that is clear is that this system 
must remain obscure to us. It cannot be re- 
produced in English. The metrical versions of 
the Psalms are the least satisfactory. The poet 
Cowley said of them, “They are so far from do- 
ing justice to David that methinks they revile 
him worse than Shimei.”* We must learn to 
appreciate the poetry in the Psalms without the 
aid of those symmetries of form and sound in 
which they first appeared. This is a serious 
loss. Poetry without verse is like a bride with- 
out a bridal garment. 

* “ The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley.” London, 1710. Preface 
to Pindarique Odes, volume I, page 184. 

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The second thing that we lose in reading the 
Psalms in English is something even more im- 
portant. It is the heavy tax on the wealth of 
its meaning, which all poetry must pay when it 
is imported from one country to another, 
through the medium of translation. 

The most subtle charm of poetry is its sug- 
gestiveness; and much of this comes from the 
magical power which words acquire over mem- 
ory and imagination, from their associations. 
This intimate and personal charm must be left 
behind when a poem passes from one language 
to another. The accompaniment, the harmony 
of things remembered and beloved, which the 
very words of the song once awakened, is silent 
now. Nothing remains but the naked melody 
of thought. If this is pure and strong, it will 
gather new associations; as, indeed, the Psalms 
have already done in English, so that their 
familiar expressions have become charged with 
musical potency. And yet I suppose such 
phrases as “a tree planted by the rivers of 
water,” “a fruitful vine in the innermost parts 
of the house,” “the mountains round about 
Jerusalem,” can never bring to us the full sense 
of beauty, the enlargement of heart, that they 
gave to the ancient Hebrews. But, in spite of 
this double loss, in the passage from verse to 
36 


POETRY IN THE PSALMS 


prose and from Hebrew to English, the poetry 
in the Psalms is so real and vital and imperish- 
able that every reader feels its beauty and 
power. 

It retains one valuable element of poetic 
form. This is that balancing of the parts of a 
sentence, one against another, to which Bishop 
Lowth first gave the familiar name of “parallel- 
ism.”* The effect of this simple artifice, 
earned from Nature herself, is singularly pleas- 
ant and powerful. It is the rise and fall of the 
fountain, the ebb and flow of the tide, the tone 
and overtone of the chiming bell. The two- 
fold utterance seems to bear the thought on- 
ward like the wings of a bird. A German 
writer compares it very exquisitely to “the 
heaving and sinking of the troubled heart.” 

It is this “parallelism” which gives such a 
familiar charm to the language of the Psalms. 
Unconsciously, and without recognizing the 
nature of the attraction, we grow used to the 
double cadence, the sound and the echo, and 
learn to look for its recurrence with delight. 

0 come let us sing unto the Lord; 

Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation , 

Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving; 

And make a joyful noise unto him with psalms. 

* Lowth, De Sacra Poesi HebrcBorum Praelectiones. Oxon., 1753. 

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If we should want a plain English name for 
this method of composition we might call it 
thought-rhyme. It is easy to find varied illus- 
trations of its beauty and of its power to em- 
phasize large and simple ideas. 

Take for instance that very perfect psalm 
with which the book begins — a poem so com- 
plete, so compact, so delicately wrought that 
it seems like a sonnet. The subject is The Two 
Paths . 

The first part describes the way of the good 
man. It has three divisions. 

The first verse gives a description of his con- 
duct by negatives — telling us what he does not 
do. There is a triple thought-rhyme here. 

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the 
ungodly , 

Nor standeth in the way of sinners , 

Nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. 

The second verse describes his character posi- 
tively, with a double thought-rhyme. 

But his delight is in the law of the Lord; 

And in his law doth he meditate day and night. 

The third verse tells us the result of this char- 
acter and conduct, in a fourfold thought-rhyme. 
38 


POETRY IN THE PSALMS 


He shall he like a tree 'planted by the rivers of water: 
That bring eth forth his fruit in his season: 

His leaf also shall not wither: 

And whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. 

The second part of the psalm describes the way 
of the evil man. In the fourth verse there is a 
double thought-rhyme. 

The ungodly are not so: 

But are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. 

In the fifth verse the consequences of this 
worthless, fruitless, unrooted life are shown, 
again with a double cadence of thought, the 
first referring to the judgment of God, the sec- 
ond to the judgment of men. 

Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment: 
Nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. 

The third part of the psalm is a terse, powerful 
couplet, giving the reason for the different end- 
ing of the two paths. 

For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous: 

But the way of the ungodly shall perish. 

The thought-rhyme here is one of contrast. 

A poem of very different character from this 
brief, serious, impersonal sonnet is found in the 
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Forty-sixth Psalm, which might be called a 
National Anthem. Here again the poem is 
divided into three parts. 

The first part (verses first to third) expresses 
a sense of joyful confidence in the Eternal, amid 
the tempests and confusions of earth. The 
thought-rhymes are in couplets; and the sec- 
ond phrase, in each case, emphasizes and en- 
larges the idea of the first phrase. 

God is our refuge and strength: 

A very 'present help in trouble. 

The second part (verses fourth to seventh) 
describes the peace and security of the city of 
God, surrounded by furious enemies, but re- 
joicing in the Eternal Presence. The parallel 
phrases here follow the same rule as in the first 
part. The concluding phrase is the stronger, 
the more emphatic. The seventh verse gives 
the refrain or chorus of the anthem. 

The Lord of hosts is with us: 

The God of J acob is our refuge. 

The last part (verses eighth to tenth) describes 
in a very vivid and concrete way the deliver- 
ance of the people that have trusted in the 
Eternal. It begins with a couplet, like those 
which have gone before. Then follow two 
40 


POETRY IN THE PSALMS 

stanzas of triple thought-rhymes, in which the 
thought is stated and intensified with each repe- 
tition. 

He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth: 

He hreaketh the how, and cuiteth the spear in sunder: 

He hurneth the chariot in the fire. 

Be still , and know that I am God: 

I will he exalted among the heathen: 

I unll he exalted in the earth. 

The anthem ends with a repetition of the re- 
frain. 

A careful study of the Psalms, even in Eng- 
lish, will enable the thoughtful reader to de- 
rive new pleasure from them, by tracing the 
many modes and manners in* which this poetic 
form of thought-rhyme is used to bind the com- 
position together, and to give balance and har- 
mony to the poem. 

Another element of poetic form can be dis- 
cerned in the Psalms, not directly, in the Eng- 
lish version, but by its effects. I mean the 
curious artifice of alphabetic arrangement. It 
was a favourite practice among Hebrew poets 
to begin their verses with the successive letters 
of the alphabet, or sometimes to vary the de- 
vice by making every verse in a strophe begin 
with one letter, and every verse in the next 
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strophe with the following letter, and so on to 
the end. The Twenty-fifth and the Thirty- 
seventh Psalms were written by the first of 
these rules; the One Hundred and Nineteenth 
Psalm follows the second plan. 

Of course the alphabetic artifice disappears 
entirely in the English translation. But its 
effects remain. The Psalms written in this 
manner usually have but a single theme, which 
is repeated over and over again, in different 
words and with new illustrations. They are 
kaleidoscopic. The material does not change, 
but it is turned this way and that way, and 
shows itself in new shapes and arrangements. 
These alphabetic psalms are characterized by 
poverty of action and richness of expression. 

II 

Milton has already reminded us that the 
Psalms belong to the second of the three orders 
into which the Greeks, with clear discernment, 
divided all poetry: the epic, the lyric, and the 
dramatic. The Psalms are rightly called lyrics 
because they are chiefly concerned with the im- 
mediate and imaginative expression of real 
feeling. It is the personal and emotional note 
that predominates. They are inward, confes- 

42 


POETRY IN THE PSALMS 

sional, intense; outpourings of the quickened 
spirit; self -revelations of the heart. It is for 
this reason that we should never separate them 
in our thought from the actual human life out 
of which they sprung. We must feel the warm 
pulse of humanity in them in order to compre- 
hend their meaning and immortal worth. So 
far as we can connect them with the actual ex- 
perience of men, this will help us to appreciate 
their reality and power. The effort to do this 
will make plain to us some other things which 
it is important to remember. 

We shall see at once that the book does not 
come from a single writer, but from many 
authors and ages. It represents the heart of 
man in communion with God through a thou- 
sand years of history, from Moses to Nehemiah, 
perhaps even to the time of the Maccabean 
revival. It is, therefore, something very much 
larger and better than an individual book. 

It is the golden treasury of lyrics gathered 
from the life of the Hebrew people, the hymn- 
book of the Jews. And this gives to it a singu- 
lar and precious quality of brotherhood. The 
fault, or at least the danger, of modern lyrical 
poetry is that it is too solitary and separate in 
its tone. It tends towards exclusiveness, over- 
refinement, morbid sentiment. Many Chris- 
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tian hymns suffer from this defect. But the 
Psalms breathe a spirit of human fellowship 
even when they are most intensely personal. 
The poet rejoices or mourns in solitude, it may 
be, but he is not alone in spirit. He is one of 
the people. He is conscious always of the ties 
that bind him to his brother men. Compare 
the intense selfishness of the modern hymn: 

I can but 'perish if I go; 

I am resolved to try; 

For if I stay away , I know 
I shall forever die; 

with the generous penitence of the Fifty-first 
Psalm : 

Then will I teach transgressors thy way; 

And sinners shall be converted unto thee. 

It is important to observe that there are 
several different kinds of lyrics among the 
Psalms. Some of them are simple and natural 
outpourings of a single feeling, like A Shepherd's 
Song about His Shepherd , the incomparable 
Twenty-third Psalm. 

This little poem is a perfect melody. It 
would be impossible to express a pure, unmixed 
emotion — the feeling of joy in the Divine Good- 
ness — more simply, with a more penetrating 
44 


POETRY IN THE PSALMS 

lyrical charm. The “valley of the death- 
shadow,” the “enemies” in whose presence the 
table is spread, are but dimly suggested in the 
background. The atmosphere of the psalm is 
clear and bright. The singing shepherd walks 
in light. The whole world is the House of the 
Lord, and life is altogether gladness. 

How different is the tone, the quality, of the 
One Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm! This is 
not a melody, but a harmony; not a song, but 
an ode. The ode has been defined as “a strain 
of exalted and enthusiastic lyrical verse, di- 
rected to a fixed purpose and dealing pro- 
gressively with one dignified theme.”* This 
definition precisely fits the One Hundred and 
Nineteenth Psalm. 

Its theme is The Eternal Word. Every verse 
in the poem, except one, contains some name or 
description of the law, commandments, testi- 
monies, precepts, statutes, or judgments of 
Jehovah. Its enthusiasm for the Divine Right- 
eousness never fails from beginning to end. Its 
fixed purpose is to kindle in other hearts the 
flame of devotion to the one Holy Law. It 
closes with a touch of magnificent pathos — 
a confession of personal failure and an assertion 
of spiritual loyalty: 

* English Odes, selected by Edmund Gosse. Preface, page xiii. 

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I have gone astray like a lost sheep: 

Seek thy servant: 

For I do not forget thy commandments . 

The Fifteenth Psalm I should call a short didac- 
tic lyric. Its title is The Good Citizen . It be- 
gins with a question: 

Lord , who shall abide in thy tabernacle? 

Who shall dwell in thy holy hill? 

This question is answered by the description of 
a man whose character corresponds to the law 
of God. First there is a positive sketch in three 
broad lines: 

He that walketh uprightly. 

And worketh righteousness. 

And speaketh truth in his heart. 

Then comes a negative characterization in a 
finely touched triplet: 

He that backbiteth not with his tongue , 

Nor doeth evil to his neighbour. 

Nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour. 

This is followed by a couplet containing a 
strong contrast: 

In whose eyes a vile person is contemned: 

But he honoureth them that fear the Lord. 

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POETRY IN THE PSALMS 


Then the description goes back to the negative 
style again and three more touches are added to 
the picture: 

He that swear eth to his own hurt and chang eth not , 

He that putteth not out his money to usury , 

Nor taketh reward against the innocent. 

The poem closes with a single vigourous line, 
summing up the character of the good citizen 
and answering the question of the first verse 
with a new emphasis of security and perma- 
nence : 

He that doeth these things shall never he moved . 

The Seventy-eighth, One Hundred and Fifth, 
and One Hundred and Sixth Psalms are lyrical 
ballads. They tell the story of Israel in Egypt, 
and in the Wilderness, and in Canaan, with 
swift, stirring phrases, and with splendid flashes 
of imagery. Take this passage from the Sev- 
enty-eighth Psalm as an example: 

He clave the rocks in the wilderness , 

And gave them drink out of the great depths. 

He brought streams also out of the rock y 

And caused waters to run down like rivers. 

And they sinned yet more against him , 

Provoking the Most High in the wilderness . 

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They tempted God in their hearts. 

Asking meat for their lust. 

Yea , they spake against God: 

They said , Can God furnish a table in the wilderness? 

Behold , he smote the rock that the waters gushed out. 
And the streams overflowed; 

Can he give bread also ? 

Can he provide flesh for his people? 

Therefore the Lord heard and was wroth: 

So a fire was kindled against Jacob, 

And anger also came up against Israel: 

Because they believed not in God , 

And trusted not in his salvation: 

Though he had commanded the clouds from above , 

And opened the doors of heaven , 

And had rained down manna upon them to eat , 

And had given them of the corn of heaven, 

Man did eat angel’s food: 

He sent them meat to the full. 

He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven , 

And by his power he brought in the south wind . 

He rained flesh also upon them as dust, 

And feathered fowls like as the sand of the sea. 

And he let it fall in the midst of their camp. 

Round about their habitations; 

So they did eat and were filled. 

For he gave them their own desire. 

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POETRY IN THE PSALMS 


They were not estranged from their lust: 

But while the meat was yet in their mouths. 

The wrath of God came upon them, and slew the fattest 
of them, 

And smote down the chosen men of Israel. 

The Forty-fifth Psalm is a Marriage Ode: 
the Hebrew title calls it a Love Song. It bears 
all the marks of having been composed for 
some royal wedding-feast in Jerusalem. 

There are many nature lyrics among the 
Psalms. The Twenty-ninth is notable for its 
rugged realism. It is a Song of Thunder. 

The voice of the Lord hreaketh the cedars: 

Yea , the Lord hreaketh the cedars of Lebanon: 

He maketh them also to skip like a calf: 

Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn. 

The One Hundred and Fourth, on the contrary, 
is full of calm sublimity and meditative gran- 
deur. 


0, Lord , my God , thou art very great: 

Thou art clothed with honour and majesty: 

Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment; 
Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain. 

The Nineteenth is famous for its splendid com- 
parison between “the starry heavens and the 
moral law. ” 

I think that we may find also some dramatic 

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lyrics among the Psalms — poems composed to 
express the feelings of an historic person, like 
David or Solomon, in certain well-known and 
striking experiences of his life. That a later 
writer should thus embody and express the 
truth dramatically through the personality of 
some great hero of the past, involves no false- 
hood. It is a mode of utterance which has 
been common to the literature of all lands and 
of all ages. Such a method of composition 
would certainly be no hindrance to the spirit 
of inspiration. The Thirty-first Psalm, for in- 
stance, is ascribed by the title to David. But 
there is strong reason, in the phraseology and 
in the spirit of the poem, to believe that it was 
written by the Prophet Jeremiah. 

Ill 

It is not to be supposed that our reverence 
for the Psalms in their moral and religious as- 
pects will make us put them all on the same 
level poetically. There is a difference among 
the books of the New Testament in regard to 
the purity and dignity of the Greek in which 
they are written. There is a difference among 
St. Paul’s Epistles in regard to the clearness 
and force of their style. There is a difference 
even among the chapters of the same epistle in 

50 


POETRY IX THE PSALMS 

regard to the beauty of thought and language. 
In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, the 
thirteenth chapter is poetic, and the fourteenth 
is prosaic. Why should there not be a differ- 
ence in poetic quality among the Psalms ? 

There is a difference. The honest reader 
will recognize it. It will be no harm to him if 
he should have his favourites among the poems 
which have been gathered from many centuries 
into this great collection. 

There are some, like the Twenty-seventh, the 
Forty-second, the Forty-sixth, the Fifty-first, 
the Sixty-third, the Ninety-first, the Ninety- 
sixth, the One Hundred and Third, the One 
Hundred and Seventh, the One Hundred and 
Thirty-ninth, which rank with the noblest po- 
etic lit era t ure of the world. Others move on a 
lower level, and show the traces of effort and 
constraint. There are also manifest altera- 
tions and interpolations, which are not always 
improvements. Dr. Perowne, who is one of the 
wisest and most conservative of modern com- 
mentators, says, “Many of the Psalms have not 
come down to us in their original form/'* and 
refers to the alterations which the Seventieth 
makes in the Fortieth, and the Fifty-third in 

* The Book of Psalms. t volumes, London, 1883. Volume I. 
page 82. 


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the Fourteenth. The last two verses of the 
Fifty-first were evidently added by a later 
hand. The whole book, in its present form, 
shows the marks of its compilation and use as 
the Hymn-Book of the Jewish people. Not 
only in the titles, but also in the text, we can 
discern the work of the compiler, critic, and 
adapter, sometimes wise, but occasionally other- 
wise. 

IV 

The most essential thing in the appreciation 
of the poetry in the Psalms is the recognition of 
the three great spiritual qualities which dis- 
tinguish them. 

The first of these is the deep and genuine love 
of nature. The psalmists delight in the vision 
of the world, and their joy quickens their senses 
to read both the larger hieroglyphs of glory 
written in the stars and the delicate tracings of 
transient beauty on leaf and flower; to hear 
both the mighty roaring of the sea and the soft 
sweet laughter of the rustling corn-fields. But 
in all these they see the handwriting and hear 
the voice of God. It is His presence that 
makes the world sublime and beautiful. The 
direct, piercing, elevating sense of this presence 
simplifies, enlarges, and ennobles their style, 
52 


POETRY IN THE PSALMS 

and makes it different from other nature-poetry. 
They never lose themselves, as Theocritus and 
Wordsworth and Shelley and Tennyson some- 
times do, in the contemplation and description 
of natural beauty. They see it, but they al- 
ways see beyond it. Compare, for example, a 
modern versified translation with the psalm 
itself : 

The spacious firmament on high , 

With all the blue ethereal sky 

And spangled heavens , a shining frame, 

Their Great Original proclaim .* 

Addison’s descriptive epithets betray a con- 
scious effort to make a splendid picture. But 
the psalmist felt no need of this; a larger im- 
pulse lifted him at once into “the grand style:” 

The heavens declare the glory of God; 

And the firmament showeth his handiwork. 

The second quality of the poetry in the 
Psalms is their passionate sense of the beauty of 
holiness. Keats was undoubtedly right in his 
suggestion that the poet must always see truth 
in the form of beauty. Otherwise he may be a 
philosopher, or a critic, or a moralist, but he is 
not a true poet. But we must go on from this 
standpoint to the Platonic doctrine that the 

* Joseph Addison, 1712. 

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highest form of beauty is spiritual and ethical. 
The poet must also see beauty in the light of 
truth. It is the harmony of the soul with the 
eternal music of the Good. And the highest 
poets are those who, like the psalmists, are most 
ardently enamoured of righteousness. This fills 
their songs with sweetness and fire incompara- 
ble and immortal : 

The fear of the Lord is clean , enduring for ever: 

The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous alto- 
gether. 

More to he desired are they than gold , yea , than much fine 
gold : 

Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb . 

The third quality of the poetry of the Psalms 
is their intense joy in God. No lover ever 
poured out the longings of his heart toward his 
mistress more eagerly than the Psalmist voices 
his desire and thirst for God. No conqueror 
ever sang of victory more exultantly than the 
Psalmist rejoices in the Lord, who is his light 
and his salvation, the strength of his life and 
his portion forever. 

After all, the true mission of poetry is to 
increase joy. It must, indeed, be sensitive to 
sorrow and acquainted with grief. But it has 
wings given to it in order that it may bear us up 
into the air of gladness. 

54 


POETRY IN THE PSALMS 

There is no perfect joy without love. There- 
fore love-poetry is the best. But the highest 
of all love-poetry is that which celebrates, with 
the Psalms, 

that Love which is and was 
My Father and my Brother and my God . 


55 



THE GOOD ENCHANTMENT OF 
CHARLES DICKENS 









































































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THE GOOD ENCHANTMENT OF 
CHARLES DICKENS 

I 

rilHERE are four kinds of novels. 

A First, those that are easy to read and 
hard to remember: the well-told tales of no 
consequence, the cream-puffs of perishable fic- 
tion. 

Second, those that are hard to read and hard 
to remember: the purpose-novels which are 
tedious sermons in disguise, and the love-tales 
in which there is no one with whom it is pos- 
sible to fall in love. 

Third, those that are hard to read and easy 
to remember: the books with a crust of per- 
verse style or faulty construction through which 
the reader must break in order to get at the 
rich and vital meaning. 

Fourth, those that are easy to read and 
easy to remember: the novels in which stories 
worth telling are well-told, and characters 
worth observing are vividly painted, and life 
is interpreted to the imagination in enduring 
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forms of literary art. These are the best- 
sellers which do not go out of print — every- 
body’s books. 

In this fourth class healthy-minded people 
and unprejudiced critics put the novels of 
Charles Dickens. For millions of readers they 
have fulfilled what Dr. Johnson called the pur- 
pose of good books, to teach us to enjoy life or 
help us to endure it. They have awakened 
laughter and tears. They have enlarged and 
enriched existence by revealing the hidden veins 
of humour and pathos beneath the surface of 
the every-day world, and by giving “the free- 
dom of the city” to those poor prisoners who 
had thought of it only as the dwelling-place of 
so many hundred thousand inhabitants and no 
real persons. 

What a city it was that Dickens opened to 
us! London, of course, in outward form and 
semblance, — the London of the early Victorian 
epoch, with its reeking Seven Dials close to its 
perfumed Piccadilly, with its grimy river-front 
and its musty Inns of Court and its mildly rural 
suburbs, with its rollicking taverns and its 
deadly solemn residential squares and its gloomy 
debtors’ prisons and its gaily insanitary mar- 
kets, with all its consecrated conventions and 
unsuspected hilarities, — vast, portentous, for- 
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CHARLES DICKENS 

mal, merry, childish, inexplicable, a wilderness 
of human homes and haunts, ever thrilling with 
sincerest passion, mirth, and pain, — London it 
was, as the eye saw it in those days, and as the 
curious traveller may still retrace some of its 
vanishing landmarks and fading features. 

But it was more than London, after Dickens 
touched it. It was an enchanted city, where 
the streets seemed to murmur of joy or fear, 
where the dark faces of the dens of crime 
scowled or leered at you, and the decrepit 
houses doddered in senility, and the new man- 
sions stared you down with stolid pride. 
Everything spoke or made a sign to you. From 
red-curtained windows jollity beckoned. From 
prison-doors lean hands stretched toward you. 
Under bridges and among slimy piers the river 
gurgled, and chuckled, and muttered unholy 
secrets. Across trim front-yards little cottages 
smiled and almost nodded their good-will. 
There were no dead spots, no deaf and dumb 
regions. All was alive and significant. Even 
the real estate became personal. One felt that 
it needed but a word, a wave of the wand, to 
bring the buildings leaping, roistering, creep- 
ing, tottering, stalking from their places. 

It was an enchanted city, and the folk who 
filled it and almost, but never quite, crowded it 
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to suffocation, were so intensely and supernat- 
urally human, so blackly bad, so brightly good, 
so touchingly pathetic, so supremely funny, 
that they also were creatures of enchantment 
and seemed to come from fairy-land. 

For what is fairy-land, after all? It is not 
an invisible region, an impossible place. It is 
only the realm of the hitherto unobserved, the 
not yet realized, where the things we have seen 
but never noticed, and the persons we have met 
but never known, are suddenly “ translated,” 
like Bottom the Weaver, and sent forth upon 
strange adventures. 

That is what happens to the Dickens people. 
Good or bad they surpass themselves when 
they get into his books. That rotund Brownie, 
Mr. Pickwick, with his amazing troupe; that 
gentle compound of Hop-o’-my-Thumb and a 
Babe in the Wood, Oliver Twist, surrounded 
by wicked uncles, and hungry ogres, and good 
fairies in bottle-green coats; that tender and 
lovely Red Riding-Hood, Little Nell; that im- 
petuous Hans-in-Luck, Nicholas Nickleby; that 
intimate Cinderella, Little Dorrit; that simple- 
minded Aladdin, Pip; all these, and a thousand 
more like them, go rambling through Dickens- 
opolis and behaving naturally in a most extraor- 
dinary manner. 


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CHARLES DICKENS 

Things that have seldom or never happened, 
occur inevitably. The preposterous becomes 
the necessary, the wildly improbable is the one 
thing that must come to pass. Mr. Dombey 
is converted, Mr. Krook is removed by spon- 
taneous combustion, Mr. Micawber performs 
amazing feats as an amateur detective, Sam 
Weller gets married, the immortally absurd 
epitaphs of Young John Chivery and Mrs. 
Sapsea are engraved upon monuments more 
lasting than brass. 

The fact is, Dickens himself was bewitched 
by the spell of his own imagination. His peo- 
ple carried him away, did what they liked 
with him. He wrote of Little Nell: “You 
can’t imagine how exhausted I am to-day with 
yesterday’s labours. I went to bed last night 
utterly dispirited and done up. All night I 
have been pursued by the child; and this morn- 
ing I am unrefreshed and miserable. I don’t 
know what to do with myself. ... I think 
the close of the story will be great.” Again he 
says: “As to the way in which these characters 
have opened out [in Martin Chuzzlewit ], that is 
to me one of the most surprising processes of 
the mind in this sort of invention. Given what 
one knows, what one does not know springs 
up; and I am as absolutely certain of its being 
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true, as I am of the law of gravitation — if such a 
thing is possible, more so.” 

Precisely such a thing (as Dickens very well 
understood) is not only possible, but unavoid- 
able. For what certainty have we of the law 
of gravitation? Only by hearsay, by the sub- 
missive reception of a process of reasoning con- 
ducted for us by Sir Isaac Newton and other 
vaguely conceived men of science. The fall of 
an apple is an intense reality (especially if it 
falls upon your head); but the law which reg- 
ulates its speed is for you an intellectual ab- 
straction as remote as the idea of a “combina- 
tion in restraint of trade,” or the definition of 
“art for art’s sake.” Whereas the irrepressible 
vivacity of Sam Weller, and the unctuous 
hypocrisy of Pecksniff, and the moist humility 
of Uriah Heep, and the sublime conviviality of 
Dick Swiveller, and the triumphant make-be- 
lieve of the Marchioness are facts of experience. 
They have touched you, and you cannot doubt 
them. The question whether they are actual or 
imaginary is purely academic. 

Another fairy-land feature of Dickens’s world 
is the way in which minor personages of the 
drama suddenly take the centre of the stage 
and hold the attention of the audience. It is 
always so in fairy -land. 

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CHARLES DICKENS 

In The Tempest , what are Prospero and Mi- 
randa, compared with Caliban and Ariel? In 
A Midsummer Night's Dream , who thinks as 
much of Oberon and Titania, as of Puck, and 
Bottom the Weaver? Even in an historical 
drama like Henry IV, we feel that Falstaff is 
the most historic character. 

Dickens’s first lady and first gentleman are 
often less memorable than his active super- 
numeraries. A hobgoblin like Quilp, a good 
old nurse like Peggotty, a bad old nurse like 
Sairey Gamp, a volatile elf like Miss Mowcher, 
a shrewd elf and a blunder-headed elf like 
Susan Nipper and Mr. Toots, a good-natured 
disreputable sprite like Charley Bates, a ma- 
licious gnome like Noah Claypole, a wicked ogre 
like Wackford Squeers, a pair of fairy-god- 
mothers like the Cheeryble Brothers, a dandy 
ouphe like Mr. Mantalini, and a mischievous, 
wooden-legged kobold like Silas W egg, take 
stronger hold upon us than the Harry Maylies 
and Rose Flemings, the John Harmons and 
Bella Wilfers, for whose ultimate matrimonial 
felicity the business of the plot is conducted. 
Even the more notable heroes often pale a 
little by comparison with their attendants. 
Who remembers Martin Chuzzlewit as clearly 
as his servant Mark Tapley? Is Pip, with his 
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Great Expectations, half as delightful as his 
clumsy dry-nurse Joe Gargery? Has even the 
great Pickwick a charm to compare with the 
unique, immortal Sam Weller ? 

Do not imagine that Dickens was unconscious 
of this disarrangement of roles, or that it was 
an evidence of failure on his part. He knew 
perfectly well what he was doing. Great au- 
thors always do. They cannot help it, and they 
do not care. Homer makes Agamemnon and 
Priam the kings of his tale, and Paris the first 
walking gentleman and Helen the leading lady. 
But Achilles and Ajax and Hector are the bully 
boys, and Ulysses is the wise jester, and Ther- 
sites the tragic clown. As for Helen, — 

The face that launched a thousand ships , 

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium — 

her reputed pulchritude means less to us than 
the splendid womanhood of Andromache, or the 
wit and worth of the adorable matron Penelope. 

Now this unconventionality of art, which dis- 
regards ranks and titles, even those of its own 
making, and finds the beautiful and the absurd, 
the grotesque and the picturesque, the noble 
and the base, not according to the programme 
but according to the fact, is precisely the es- 
sence of good enchantment. 

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CHARLES DICKENS 

Good enchantment goes about discovering 
the ass in the lion’s skin and the wolf in sheep’s 
clothing, the princess in the goose-girl and the 
wise man under the fool’s cap, the pretender in 
the purple robe and the rightful heir in rags, the 
devil in the belfry and the Redeemer among 
the publicans and sinners. It is the spirit of 
revelation, the spirit of divine sympathy and 
laughter, the spirit of admiration, hope, and 
love — or better still, it is simply the spirit of life. 

When I call this the essence of good enchant- 
ment I do not mean that it is unreal. I mean 
only that it is unrealistic , which is just the oppo- 
site of unreal. It is not in bondage to the 
beggarly elements of form and ceremony. It 
is not captive to names and appearances, 
though it revels in their delightful absurdity. 
It knows that an idol is nothing, and finds all 
the more laughter in its pompous pretence of 
being something. It can afford to be merry 
because it is in earnest; it is happy because it 
has not forgotten how to weep; it is content 
because it is still unsatisfied; it is humble in 
the sense of unfathomed faults and exalted in 
the consciousness of inexhaustible power; it 
calls nothing common or unclean; it values life 
for its mystery, its surprisingness, and its divine 
reversals of human prejudice, — just like Beauty 
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and the Beast and the story of the Ugly Duck- 
ling. 

This, I say, is the essence of good enchant- 
ment; and it is also the essence of true religion. 
“For God hath chosen the foolish things of 
the world to confound the wise, and the weak 
things of the world to confound the mighty, and 
base things of the world and things which are 
despised, yea, and things which are not , to bring 
to naught things which are” 

This is also the essence of real democracy, 
which is not a theory of government but a state 
of mind. 

No one has ever expressed it better than 
Charles Dickens did in a speech which he made 
at Hartford, Connecticut, seventy years ago. 
“I have faith,” said he, “and I wish to diffuse 
faith in the existence — yes, of beautiful things, 
even in those conditions of society which are 
so degenerate, so degraded and forlorn, that at 
first sight it would seem as though it could 
only be described by a strange and terrible 
reversal of the words of Scripture — God said 
let there be light, and there was none. I take 
it that we are born, and that we hold our sym- 
pathies, hopes, and energies in trust for the 
Many and not the Few. That we cannot hold 
in too strong a light of disgust and contempt, 
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CHARLES DICKENS 

before our own view and that of others, all 
meanness, falsehood, cruelty, and oppression of 
every grade and kind. Above all, that noth- 
ing is high because it is in a high place; and 
that nothing is low because it is in a low place. 
This is the lesson taught us in the great book of 
Nature. This is the lesson which may be read 
alike in the bright track of the stars, and in 
the dusty course of the poorest thing that drags 
its tiny length upon the ground.” 

This was the creed of Dickens; and like 
every man’s creed, conscious or unconscious, 
confessed or concealed, it made him what he was. 

It has been said that he had no deep phi- 
losophy, no calmly reasoned and clearly stated 
theory of the universe. Perhaps that is true. 
Yet I believe he hardly missed it. He was too 
much interested in living to be anxious about a 
complete theory of life. Perhaps it would have 
helped him wdien trouble came, when domestic 
infelicity broke up his home, if he could have 
climbed into some philosopher’s ivory tower. 
Perhaps not. I have observed that even the 
most learned and philosophic mortals, under 
these afflictions, sometimes fail to appreciate 
the consolations of philosophy to any notice- 
able extent. From their ivory towers they cry 
aloud, being in pain, even as other men. 

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But it was certainly not true (even though 
his biographer wrote it, and it has been quoted 
a thousand times), that just because Dickens 
cried aloud, “ there was for him no ‘city of the 
mind’ against outward ills, for inner consola- 
tion and shelter.” He was not cast out and 
left comfortless. Faith, hope, and charity — 
these three abode with him. His human sym- 
pathy, his indomitable imagination, his im- 
mense and varied interest in the strange ad- 
ventures of men and women, his unfaltering 
intuition of the truer light of God that burns 

In this vexed heating stuffed and stopped-up brain. 
Heart , or whatever else 

these were the celestial powers and bright ser- 
viceable angels that built and guarded for him 
a true “city of refuge,” secure, inviolate, ever 
open to the fugitive in the day of his calamity. 
Thither he could flee to find safety. There he 
could ungird his heart and indulge 

Love and the thoughts that breathe for humankind; 

there he could laugh and sing and weep with 
the children, the dream-children, which God 
had given him; there he could enter into his 
work-shop and shut the door and lose himself 
in joyous labour which should make the world 
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CHARLES DICKENS 

richer by the gift of good books. And so he 
did, even until the end came and the pen fell 
from his fingers, he sitting safe in his city of 
refuge, learning and unfolding The Mystery of 
Edwin Drood. 

O enchanted city, great asylum in the mind 
of man, where ideals are embodied, and visions 
take form and substance to parley with us! 
Imagination rears thy towers and Fancy popu- 
lates thy streets; yet art thou a city that hath 
foundations, a dwelling eternal though unseen. 
Ever building, changing, never falling, thy walls 
are open-gated day and night. The fountain 
of youth is in thy gardens, the treasure of the 
humble in thy storehouses. Hope is thy door- 
keeper, and Faith thy warden, and Love thy 
Lord. In thee the wanderer may take shelter 
and find himself by forgetting himself. In thee 
rest and refreshment are waiting for the weary, 
and new courage for the despondent, and new 
strength for the faint. From thy magic case- 
ments we have looked upon unknown horizons, 
and we return from thy gates to our task, our 
toil, our pilgrimage, with better and braver 
hearts, knowing more surely that the things 
which are seen were not made of things which 
do appear, and that the imperishable jewels 
of the universe are in the souls of men. O city 
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of good enchantment, for my brethren and com- 
panions’ sakes I will now say: Peace be within 
thee! 

II 

Of the outward appearance, or, as Sartor 
Resartus would have called it, the Time-Vesture 
and Flesh-Garment of that flaming light-par- 
ticle which was cast hither from Heaven in the 
person of Charles Dickens, and of his ways and 
manners while he hasted jubilantly and storm- 
fully across the astonished Earth, something 
must be said here. 

Charles Dickens was born at Portsea, in 
1812 , an offspring of what the accurate Eng- 
lish call the “ lower middle class.” Inheriting 
something from a father who was decidedly 
Micawberish, and a mother who resembled Mrs. 
Nickleby, Charles was not likely to be a hum- 
drum child. But the remarkable thing about 
him was the intense, aspiring, and gaily sensible 
spirit with which he entered into the business 
of developing whatever gifts he had received 
from his vague and amiable parents. 

The fat streak of comfort in his childish 
years, when his proud father used to stand the 
tiny lad on a table to sing comic songs for an 
applauding audience of relatives, could not 
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CHARLES DICKENS 

spoil him. The lean streak of misery, when the 
improvident family sprawled in poverty, with 
its head in a debtors’ prison, while the bright, 
delicate, hungry boy roamed the streets, or 
drudged in a dirty blacking-factory, could not 
starve him. The two dry years of school at 
Wellington House Academy could not fossilize 
him. The years from fifteen to nineteen, when 
he was earning his bread as office-boy, lawyers’ 
clerk, shorthand reporter, could not commer- 
cialize him. Through it all he burned his way 
painfully and joyously. 

He was not to be detailed as a perpetual 
comic songster in upholstered parlors; nor as a 
prosperous frock-coated citizen with fatty de- 
generation of the mind; nor as a newspaper 
politician, a power beneath the footstool. None 
of these alluring prospects delayed him. He 
passed them by, observing everything as he 
went, now hurrying, now sauntering, for all the 
world like a boy who has been sent somewhere. 
Whereat was, he found out in his twenty -fifth 
year, when the extraordinary results of his self- 
education bloomed in the Pickwick Payers and 
Oliver Twist . 

Never was a good thing coming out of Naz- 
areth more promptly welcomed. The simple- 
minded critics of that day had not yet discov- 
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ered the damning nature of popularity, and 
they hailed the new genius in spite of the fact 
that hundreds of thousands of people were read- 
ing his books. His success was exhilarating, 
overwhelming, and at times intoxicating. 

It was roses , roses all the way . — 

Some of them had thorns, which hurt his thin 
skin horribly, but they never made him despair 
or doubt the goodness of the universe. Being 
vexed, he let it off in anger instead of distilling 
it into pessimism to poison himself. Life was 
too everlastingly interesting for him to be long 
unhappy. A draught of his own triumph 
would restore him, a slice of his own work would 
reinvigorate him, and he would go on with his 
industrious dreaming. 

No one enjoyed the reading of his books more 
than he the making of them, though he some- 
times suffered keenly in the process. That was 
a proof of his faith that happiness does not con- 
sist in the absence of suffering, but in the pres- 
ence of joy. Dulness, insincerity, stupid hum- 
bug — voila Vennemi! So he lived and wrote 
with a high hand and an outstretched arm. He 
made men see what he saw, and hate what he 
hated, and love what he loved. This was his 
great reward, — more than money, fame, or 
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CHARLES DICKENS 

hosts of friends, — that he saw the children of 
his brain enter into the common life of the 
world. 

But he was not exempt from the ordinary 
laws of nature. The conditions of his youth 
left their marks for good and evil on his matur- 
ity. The petting of his babyhood gave him the 
habit of showing off. We often see him as a 
grown man, standing on the table and reciting 
his little piece, or singing his little song, to 
please an admiring audience. He delighted in 
playing to the galleries. 

His early experience of poverty made him at 
once tremendously sympathetic and invincibly 
optimistic — both of which virtues belong to the 
poor more than to the rich. Dickens under- 
stood this and never forgot it. The chief mo- 
ralities of his poor people are mutual helpfulness 
and unquenchable hopefulness. From them, 
also, he caught the tone of material comfort 
which characterizes his visions of the reward 
of virtue. Having known cold and hunger, 
he simply could not resist the desire to make his 
favourite characters — if they stayed on earth 
till the end of the book — warm and “ comfy,” 
and to give them plenty to eat and drink. 
This may not have been artistic, but it was 
intensely human. 


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The same personal quality may be noted in 
his ardour as a reformer. No writer of fiction 
has ever done more to better the world than 
Charles Dickens. But he did not do it by set- 
ting forth programmes of legislation and theories 
of government. As a matter of fact, he pro- 
fessed an amusing “ contempt for the House of 
Commons,” having been a Parliamentary re- 
porter; and of Sir Robert Peel, who emanci- 
pated the Catholics, enfranchised the Jews, and 
repealed the Corn Laws, he thought so little 
that he caricatured him as Mr. Pecksniff. 

Dickens felt the evils of the social order at 
the precise point where the shoe pinched; he 
did not go back to the place where the leather 
was tanned or the last designed. It was some 
practical abuse in poorhouses or police-courts 
or prisons; it was some hidden shame in the 
conduct of schools, or the renting of tenements; 
it was some monumental absurdity in the Cir- 
cumlocution Office, some pompous and cruel 
delay in the course of justice, that made him 
hot with indignation. These were the things 
that he assailed with Rabelaisian laughter, or 
over which he wept with a deeper and more 
sincere pity than that of Tristram Shandy. 
His idea was that if he could get people to see 
that a thing was both ridiculous and cruel, they 
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CHARLES DICKENS 

would want to stop it. What would come after 
that, he did not clearly know, nor had he any 
particularly valuable suggestions to make, ex- 
cept the general proposition that men should 
do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly 
with their God. 

He took no stock in the doleful predictions of 
the politicians that England was in an awful 
state merely because Lord Coodle was going 
out of office, and Sir Thomas Doodle would not 
come in, and each of these was the only man to 
save the country. The trouble seemed to him 
deeper and more real. It was a certain fat- 
witted selfishness, a certain callous, complacent 
blindness in the people who were likely to read 
his books. He conceived that his duty as a 
novelist was done when he had shown up the 
absurd and hateful things, and made people 
laugh at their ugliness, weep over their inhu- 
manity, and long to sweep them away. 

In this attitude, I think, Dickens was not 
only natural, and true to his bringing-up, but 
also wise as a great artist in literature. For I 
have observed that brilliant writers, while often 
profitable as satirists to expose abuses, are 
seldom judicious as legislators to plan reforms. 

Before we leave this subject of the effects of 
Dickens’s early poverty and sudden popularity, 
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we must consider his alleged lack of refinement. 
Some say that he was vulgar, others that he 
was ungrateful and inconsiderate of the feel- 
ings of his friends and relations, others that he 
had little or no taste. I should rather say, in 
the words of the old epigram, that he had a 
great deal of taste, and that some of it was very 
bad. 

Take the matter of his caricaturing real 
people in his books. No one could object to 
his use of the grotesque insolence of a well- 
known London magistrate as the foundation of 
his portrait of Mr. Fang in Oliver Twist . That 
was public property. But the amiable eccen- 
tricities of his own father and mother, the airy 
irresponsible ways of his good friend Leigh 
Hunt, were private property. Yet even here 
Dickens could not reasonably be blamed for 
observing them, for being amused by them, or 
for letting them enrich his general sense of the 
immense, incalculable, and fantastic humour of 
the world. Taste, which is simply another 
name for the gusto of life, has a comic side; 
and a man who is keenly sensitive to everything 
cannot be expected to be blind to the funny 
things that happen among his family and 
friends. But when Dickens used these private 
delights for the public amusement, and in such 
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CHARLES DICKENS 

a form that the partial portraits of Mr. and 
Mrs. Micawber, Mrs. Nickleby, and Harold 
Skimpole were easily identified, all that we can 
say is that his taste was still there, but it had 
gone bad. What could you expect? Where, 
in his early years, was he likely to have learned 
the old-fashioned habit of reserve in regard to 
private affairs, which you may call either a 
mark of good manners, or a sign of silly pride, 
according to your own education ? 

Or take his behaviour during his first visit to 
America in 1842, and immediately after his 
return to England. His reception was enough 
to turn anybody’s head. “There never was a 
king or emperor,” wrote Dickens to a friend, 
“so cheered and followed by crowds, and enter- 
tained at splendid balls and dinners, and waited 
upon by public bodies of all kinds.” This was 
at the beginning. At the end he was criticized 
by all, condemned by many, and abused by 
some of the newspapers. Why? Chiefly be- 
cause he used the dinners given in his honour as 
occasions to convict the Americans of their 
gross national sin of literary piracy, and be- 
cause when he got home he wrote a book of 
American Notes , containing some very severe 
strictures upon the country which had just 
entertained him so magnificently. 

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Mr. Chesterton defends Dickens for his at- 
tack upon the American practice of book-steal- 
ing which grew out of the absence of an Inter- 
national Copyright Law. He says that it was 
only the new, raw sensibility of the Americans 
that was hurt by these speeches. “Dickens 
was not in the least desirous of being thought 
too ‘high-souled’ to want his wages. . . . He 
asked for his money in a valiant and ringing 
voice, like a man asking for his honour.” And 
this, Mr. Chesterton leaves us to infer, is what 
any bold Englishman, as distinguished from a 
timidly refined American, would do. 

Precisely. But if the bold Englishman had 
been gently-bred would he have accepted an 
invitation to dinner in order that he might 
publicly say to his host, in a valiant and ringing 
voice, “You owe me a thousand pounds”? 
Such procedure at the dinner-table is contrary 
not only to good manners but also to good di- 
gestion. This is what Mr. Chesterton’s bold 
British constitution apparently prevents him 
from seeing. What Dickens said about inter- 
national copyright was right. But he was 
wretchedly wrong in his choice of the time and 
place for saying it. The natural irritation 
which his bad taste produced was one of the 
causes which delayed for fifty years the success 
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CHARLES DICKENS 


of the efforts of American authors to secure 
copyright for foreign authors. 

The same criticism applies to the American 
Notes . Read them again and you will see that 
they are not bad notes. With much that he 
says about Yankee boastfulness and superfi- 
ciality, and the evils of slavery, and the dangers 
of yellow journalism, every sane American will 
agree to-day. But the occasion which Dickens 
took for making these remarks was not happily 
chosen. It was as if a man who had just been 
entertained at your house should write to thank 
you for the pleasure of the visit, and improve 
the opportunity to point out the shocking de- 
fects of your domestic service and the exceed- 
ingly bad tone which pervaded your establish- 
ment. Such a 44 bread-and-butter letter” might 
be full of good morals, but their effect would be 
diminished by its bad manners. Of this Dick- 
ens was probably quite unconscious. He acted 
spontaneously, irrepressibly, vivaciously, in ac- 
cordance with his own taste; and it surprised 
and irritated him immensely that people were 
offended by it. 

It was precisely so in regard to his personal 
appearance. When the time suddenly arrived 
that he could indulge his taste in dress without 
fear of financial consequences, he did so hila- 
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riously and to the fullest extent. Here is a 
description of him as he appeared to an Ameri- 
can girl at an evening party in Cincinnati 
eighty years ago. “He is young and hand- 
some, has a mellow beautiful eye, fine brow and 
abundant hair. . . . His manner is easy and 
negligent, but not elegant. His dress was fop- 
pish. . . . He had a dark coat with lighter 
pantaloons; a black waistcoat embroidered 
with coloured flowers; and about his neck, cov- 
ering his white shirt-front, was a black neck- 
cloth also embroidered with colours, on which 
were two large diamond pins connected by a 
chain; a gold watch-chain and a large red rose 
in his buttonhole completed his toilet.” 

The young lady does not seem to have been 
delighted with this costume. But Dickens did 
not dress to please her, he dressed to please 
himself. His taste was so exuberant that it 
naturally effervesced in this kind of raiment. 
There was certainly nothing immoral about it. 
He had paid for it and he had a right to wear 
it, for to him it seemed beautiful. He would 
have been amazed to know that any young lady 
did not like it; and her opinion would probably 
have had little effect upon him, for he wrote of 
the occasion on which this candid girl met him, 
as follows: “In the evening we went to a party 
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CHARLES DICKENS 

at Judge Walker’s and were introduced to 
at least one hundred and fifty first-rate bores, 
separately and singly.” 

But what does it all amount to, this lack of 
discretion in manners, this want of reserve in 
speech, this oriental luxuriance in attire? It 
simply goes to show that Dickens himself was a 
Dickens character. 

He was vivid, florid, inexhaustible, and un- 
tamed. There was material in the little man 
for a hundred of his own immortal caricatures. 
The self-portrait that he has drawn in David 
Copperfidd is too smooth, like a retouched 
photograph. That is why David is less inter- 
esting than half-a-dozen other people in the 
book. If Dickens could have seen his own 
humourous aspects in the magic mirror of his 
fancy, it would have been among the richest of 
his observations, and if he could have let his 
enchantment loose upon the subject, not even 
the figures of Dick Swiveller and Harold Skim- 
pole would have been more memorable than 
the burlesque of “Boz” by the hand of C. D. 

But the humourous, the extravagant, the 
wildly picturesque, — would these have given a 
true and complete portrait of the man? Does 
it make any great difference what kind of 
clothes he wore, or how many blunders of taste 
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and tact he made, even tragic blunders like his 
inability to refrain from telling the world all 
about his domestic unhappiness, — does all this 
count for much when we look back upon the 
wonders which his imagination wrought in 
fiction, and upon the generous fruits which his 
heart brought forth in life? 

It is easy to endure small weaknesses when 
you can feel beneath them the presence of great 
and vital power. Faults are forgiven readily in 
one who has the genius of loving much. Better 
many blunders than the supreme mistake of a 
life that is 

Faultily faultless , icily regular , splendidly null 

Charles Dickens never made, nor indeed was 
tempted to make, that mistake. He carried 
with him the defects of his qualities, the marks 
of his early life, the penalties of his bewildering 
success. But, look you, he carried them — they 
did not crush him nor turn him from his true 
course. Forward he marched, cheering and 
beguiling the way for his comrades with mirth- 
ful stories and tales of pity, lightening many a 
burden and consoling many a dark and lonely 
hour, until he came at last to the goal of honour 
and the haven of happy rest. Those who knew 
him best saw him most clearly as Carlyle 
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CHARLES DICKENS 

did: “The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever- 
friendly, noble Dickens, — every inch of him an 
Honest Man.” 

Ill 

As an artist in fiction Dickens was great; 
but not because he had a correct theory of the 
technique of the novel, not because he always 
followed good rules and models in writing, nor 
because he was one 

Who saw life steadily and saw it whole. 

On the contrary, his vision of life, though 
vivid, was almost always partial. He was capa- 
ble of doing a great deal of bad work, which 
he himself liked. The plots of his novels, on 
which he toiled tremendously, are negligible; 
indeed it is often difficult to follow and impos- 
sible to remember them. The one of his books 
that is notably fine in structure and approxi- 
mately faultless in technique — A Tale of Two 
Cities — is so unlike his other novels that it 
stands in a class by itself, as an example of what 
he could have done if he had chosen to follow 
that line. In a way it is his most perfect 
piece of work. But it is not his most charac- 
teristic piece of work, and therefore I think it 
has less value for us than some of his other 
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books in which his peculiar, distinctive, unri- 
valled powers are more fully shown. 

After all, art must not only interpret the 
world but also reveal the artist. The lasting 
interest of his vision, its distinction, its charm, 
depend, at least in some real degree, upon the 
personal touch. Being himself a part of the 
things that are seen, he must “ paint the thing 
as he sees it ” if he wishes to win the approval of 
“the God of things as they are.” 

Now the artistic value of Dickens’s way of 
seeing things lay in its fitness to the purpose 
which he had in mind and heart, — a really great 
purpose, namely, to enhance the interest of 
life by good enchantment, to save people from 
the plague of dulness and the curse of indiffer- 
ence by showing them that the world is full of 
the stuff for hearty laughter and deep sym- 
pathy. This way of seeing things, with con- 
stant reference to their humourous and senti- 
mental potency, was essential to the genius of 
Dickens. His method of making other people 
see it was strongly influenced, if not absolutely 
determined, by two facts which seemed to lie 
outside of his career as an author: first, his 
training as a reporter for the press; second, his 
favourite avocation as an amateur actor, stage- 
manager, and dramatic reader. 

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CHARLES DICKENS 

The style of Dickens at its best is that of an 
inspired reporter. It is rapid, graphic, picto- 
rial, aiming always at a certain heightening of 
effect, making the shadows darker and the 
lights brighter for the purpose of intensifying 
sensation. He did not get it in the study but 
in the street. Take his description in Martin 
Chuzzlewit of Todgers’s Boarding House with 
its complicated smells and its mottled shades of 
dinginess; or take his picture in Little Dorrit 
of Marseilles burning in the August sunlight 
with its broad, white, universal stare. Here is 
the art of journalism, — the trick of intensifica- 
tion by omission, — carried to the limit. He 
aims distinctly at a certain effect, and he makes 
sure of getting it. 

He takes long walks in the heart of London, 
attends police courts, goes behind the scenes of 
theatres, rides in omnibuses, visits prisons and 
workhouses. You think he is seeking realism. 
Quite wrong. He is seeking a sense of reality 
which shall make realism look cheap. He is 
not trying to put up canned goods which shall 
seem more or less like fresh vegetables. He is 
trying to extract the essential flavour of places 
and people so that you can taste it in a drop. 

We find in his style an accumulation of de- 
tails all bearing on a certain point; nothing 
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that serves his purpose is overlooked; every- 
thing that is likely to distract the attention or 
obscure his aim is disregarded. The head- 
lines are in the text. When the brute. Bill 
Sykes, says to Nancy: “Get up,” you know 
what is coming. When Mrs. Todgers gives a 
party to Mr. Pecksniff you know what is com- 
ing. But the point is that when it comes, 
tragedy or comedy, it is as pure and unadul- 
terated as the most brilliant of reporters could 
make it. 

, Naturally, Dickens puts more emphasis upon 
the contrast between his characters than upon 
the contrast within them. The internal incon- 
sistencies and struggles, the slow processes of 
growth and change which are the delight of 
the psychological novelist do not especially in- 
terest him. He sees things black or white, not 
gray. The objects that attract him most, and 
on which he lavishes his art, do not belong to 
the average, but to the extraordinary. Dickens 
is not a commonplace merchant. He is a 
dealer in oddities and rarities, in fact the 
keeper of an “Old Curiosity Shop,” and he 
knows how to set forth his goods with incom- 
parable skill. 

His drawing of character is sharp rather than 
deep. He makes the figure stand out, always 
88 


CHARLES DICKENS 


recognizable, but not always thoroughly un- 
derstood. Many of his people are simply ad- 
mirable incarnations of their particular trades 
or professions : Mould the undertaker, old 
Weller the coachman, Tulkinghorn the lawyer, 
Elijah Program the political demagogue, Blim- 
ber the school-master, Stiggins the religious 
ranter, Betsey Prig the day-nurse, Cap’n Cuttle 
the retired skipper. They are all as easy to 
identify as the wooden image in front of a to- 
bacconist’s shop. Others are embodiments of 
a single passion or quality: Pecksniff of unctu- 
ous hypocrisy, Micawber of joyous improvi- 
dence, Mr. Toots of dumb sentimentalism. 
Little Dorrit of the motherly instinct in a girl, 
Joe Gargery of the motherly instinct in a man, 
Mark Tapley of resolute and strenuous opti- 
mism. If these persons do anything out of 
harmony with their head-lines, Dickens does 
not tell of it. He does not care for the incon- 
gruities, the modifications, the fine shadings 
which soften and complicate the philosophic 
and reflective view of life. He wants to write 
his “ story” sharply, picturesquely, with "snap” 
and plenty of local colour; and he does it, in his 
happiest hours, with all the verve and skill of a 
star reporter for the Morning Journal of the 
Enchanted City. 


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In this graphic and emphatic quality the art 
of Dickens in fiction resembles the art of Ho- 
garth in painting. But Dickens, like Hogarth, 
was much more than a reporter. He was a 
dramatist, and therefore he was also, by neces- 
sity, a moralist. 

I do not mean that Dickens had a dramatic 
genius in the Greek sense that he habitually 
dealt with the eternal conflict between human 
passion and inscrutable destiny. I mean only 
this: that his lifelong love for the theatre often 
led him, consciously or unconsciously, to con- 
struct the scenario of a story with a view to 
dramatic effect, and to work up the details of a 
crisis precisely as if he saw it in his mind’s eye 
on the stage. 

Notice how the dramatis persona are clearly 
marked as comic, or tragic, or sentimental. 
The moment they come upon the scene you can 
tell whether they are meant to appeal to your 
risibilities or to your sensibilities. You are in 
no danger of laughing at the heroine, or weeping 
over the funny man. Dickens knows too much 
to leave his audience in perplexity. He even 
gives to some of his personages set phrases, like 
the musical motifs of the various characters 
in the operas of Wagner, by which you may 
easily identify them. Mr. Micawber is forever 
90 


CHARLES DICKENS 

“ waiting for something to turn up.” Mr. 
Toots always reminds us that “it’s of no con- 
sequence.” Sairey Gamp never appears with- 
out her imaginary friend Mrs. Harris. Mrs. 
General has 4 ‘prunes and prism” perpetually on 
her lips. 

Observe, also, how carefully the scene is set, 
and how wonderfully the preparation is made 
for a dramatic climax in the story. If it is a 
comic climax, like the trial of Mr. Pickwick for 
breach of promise, nothing is forgotten, from 
the hysterics of the obese Mrs. Bardell to the 
feigned indignation of Sergeant Buzfuz over the 
incriminating phrase “chops and tomato sauce !” 

If it is a tragic climax, like the death of Bill 
Sykes, a score of dark premonitions lead up to 
it, the dingiest slum of London is chosen for it, 
the grimy streets are filled with a furious crowd 
to witness it, and just as the murderer is about 
to escape, the ghostly eyes of his victim glare 
upon him, and he plunges from the roof, tangled 
in his rope, to be hanged by the hand of the 
Eternal Judge as surely as if he stood upon the 
gallows. 

Or suppose the climax is not one of shame 
and terror, but of pure pity and tenderness, 
like the death of Little Nell. Then the quiet 
room is prepared for it, and the white bed is 
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decked with winter berries and green leaves 
that the child loved because they loved the 
light; and gentle friends are there to read and 
talk to her, and she sleeps herself away in lov- 
ing dreams, and the poor old grandfather, 
whom she has guided by the hand and com- 
forted, kneels at her bedside, wondering why 
his dear Nell lies so still, and the very words 
which tell us of her peace and his grief, move 
rhythmically and plaintively, like soft music 
with a dying fall. 

Close the book. The curtain descends. The 
drama is finished. The master has had his way 
with us; he has made us laugh; he has made 
us cry. We have been at the play. 

But was it not as real to us while it lasted as 
many of the scenes in which we actors daily 
take our parts? And did it not mellow our 
spirits with mirth, and soften our hearts with 
tears? And now that it is over are we not 
likely to be a little better, a little kinder, a little 
happier for what we have laughed at or wept 
over? 

Ah, master of the good enchantment, you 
have given us hours of ease and joy, and we 
thank you for them. But there is a greater 
gift than that. You have made us more will- 
ing to go cheerfully and companionably along 
92 


CHARLES DICKENS 


the strange, crowded, winding way of human 
life, because you have deepened our faith that 
there is something of the divine on earth, and 
something of the human in heaven. 


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• • 


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THACKERAY AND REAL MEN 


I N , that fragrant bunch of Theodore Roosevelt's 

Letters to His Children which has just bright- 
ened and sweetened our too sadly strenuous 
times there are some passages on novel-reading 
which are full of spirited good sense. He says 
that he can read Pendennis , and The New- 
comes, and Vanity Fair over and over again; 
he agrees with his boy in preferring Thackeray 
to Dickens, and then he gives the reason — or 
at least a reason — for this preference: 

“Of course one fundamental difference . . . 
is that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens 
was not.” 

The damnatory clause in this sentence seems 
to me too absolute, though Roosevelt softens it 
by adding, “but a man might do some mighty 
good work without being in any sense a gentle- 
man.” That is certainly true, and beyond a 
doubt Dickens did it — a wonderful plenty of it. 
It is also true that in several perfectly good 
senses he was a brave and kind gentleman, 
despite his faults in manners and dress. 

But it is the laudatory clause in Roosevelt’s 
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judgment that interests me. Thackeray’s work 
is pervaded with his personality to an unusual 
degree. It is a saturated solution of the man. 
We can taste him in every page. And it is be- 
cause we like the taste, because we find some- 
thing strong and true, bracing and stimulant in 
it, that we love to read him. ’Tis like being 
with a gentleman in any enterprise or adven- 
ture; it gives us pleasure and does us uncon- 
scious good. 

Well, then, what do we mean by “a gentle- 
man?” Tennyson calls it 

The grand old name of gentleman 
Defamed by every charlatan , 

And soil'd with all ignoble use. 

In the big New Oxford Dictionary there is more 
than a pageful of definitions of the word, and al- 
most every English essayist has tried a shot at 
it. One thing is sure, its old hereditary use as 
a title of rank or property is going out, or 
already gone. “John Jones, Gent.,” is a van- 
ishing form of address. More and more the 
word is coming to connote something in char- 
acter and conduct. Inheritance may enter into 
it, and the sense of honour has a great part in 
it, and its outward and visible sign is an unas- 
suming fitness of behaviour in the various cir- 
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THACKERAY AND REAL MEN 


cumstances of life. But its indispensable es- 
sence is reality; its native speech, sincerity; 
and its controlling spirit, good-will. 

Let us content ourselves with a description 
instead of a definition. A gentleman is a real 
man who deals honestly, bravely, frankly, and 
considerately with all sorts and conditions of 
other real men. 

This is Thackeray’s very mark and quality. 
We can feel it all through his life and works. 
Everything real in the world he recognized and 
accepted, even though he might not always 
like it. But the unreal people and things — 
the pretenders, the hypocrites, the shams, and 
the frauds (whether pious or impious) — he 
detested and scoffed away. Reality was his 
quest and his passion. He followed it with 
unfailing interest, penetration, and good tem- 
per. He found it, at least in humankind, 
always mixed and complicated, never altogether 
good nor altogether bad, no hero without a 
fault, and no villain without a germ of virtue. 
Life is really made that way. The true realist 
is not the materialist, the five-sense naturalist, 
but the man who takes into account the human 
soul and God as ultimate realities. 

Thackeray’s personal life had nothing that 
was remarkable and much that was admirable. 

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It was simply the background of his genius. 
He was a child of the upper-middle class in 
England — if you know just what that means. 
He went to the Charterhouse School in London 
(which he afterward immortalized as Greyfriars 
in The Newcomes), and illustrated his passion 
for reality by getting his nose broken in a fight, 
which gave his face a permanent Socratic cast. 
At Cambridge University he seems to have 
written much and studied little, but that little 
to good purpose. He inherited a modest for- 
tune, which he spent, not in riotous living, but 
in travel, art study in Paris, and in the most 
risky of all extravagances, the starting of new 
periodicals. When this failed and his money 
was gone, he lived in London as a hack-writer. 

His young wife was taken from him by that 
saddest of all bereavements — the loss of her 
mind. It became necessary to place her in a 
private sanitarium, where she outlived her hus- 
band by thirty years. To her, and to the two 
little daughters whom she left him, Thackeray 
was faithful and devoted. He never com- 
plained, never flinched into an easy way of 
escape from his burden. He bent his back to 
it, and, in spite of natural indolence, he worked 
hard and was cheerful. 

He made a host of friends and kept them, as 
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THACKERAY AND REAL MEN 

Stevenson puts it, “ without capitulation.” Of 
course, this grim condition implies some fric- 
tions and some dislikes, and from these Thack- 
eray was not exempt. The satire which was 
his first mode in writing was too direct and 
pungent to be relished by those who had any 
streak of self-humbug in their make-up. But, 
so far as I know, he had only one serious literary 
quarrel — that unhappy dispute with Mr. Ed- 
mund Yates, in which Dickens, with the best 
intentions in the world, became, unfortunately, 
somewhat involved. Thackeray might perhaps 
have been more generous and forgiving — he 
could have afforded that luxury. But he could 
not have been more honest and frank, more 
real, than he was. Being very angry, and for a 
just cause, he said so in plain words. Presently 
the tempest passed away. When Thackeray 
died in 1863, Dickens wrote: 

“No one can be surer than I of the greatness 
and goodness of his heart.” 

The first period of his life as a man of letters 
was given almost entirely to satirical and frag- 
mentary writing, under various noms de guerre . 
Hence, he remained for a long time in compara- 
tive poverty and obscurity, from which he 
stepped into fame and prosperity with the pub- 
lication of his first large novel. Vanity Fair , 
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COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 

in 1847-48. It was like turning the corner of 
Grub Street and coming into Glory Avenue. 

Henceforth the way was open, though not 
easy. The succession of his big, welcome novels 
was slow, steady, unbroken. Each one brought 
him thousands of new readers, and the old 
ones were semper fideles, even when they pro- 
fessed a preference for the earlier over the later 
volumes. His lecture tours in Great Britain 
and the United States were eminently success- 
ful — more so, I think, than those of Charles 
Dickens. They may have brought in less 
money, but more of what old William Caxton, 
the prince of printers, called “good fame and 
renommee.” The last of his completed books, 
and one of his most delightful, was Round- 
about Papers — a volume of essays that has 
no superior in English for a light, firm, friendly 
touch upon the realities of life. His last story 
begun was Denis Duval 9 and on this he was 
working when he laid down his pen on Christ- 
mas Eve, 1863, and fell asleep for the last time. 

It was Edmund Yates who wrote of him 
then: 

“Thackeray was dead; and the purest Eng- 
lish prose writer of the nineteenth century and 
the novelist with a greater knowledge of the 
human heart, as it really is, than any other — 
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THACKERAY AND REAL MEN 

with the exception perhaps of Shakespeare 
and Balzac — was suddenly struck down in 
the midst of us.” 

The human heart as it really is — there’s 
the point! That is what Thackeray sought to 
know, to understand, to reveal, and — no! not 
to explain, nor to judge and sentence — for that, 
as he well knew, was far beyond him or any 
of us — but his desire was to show the real heart 
of man, in its various complexities and per- 
plexities, working its way through the divers 
realities and unrealities in which we are all 
entangled. 

The acute French critic, Edmond Scherer, 
distinguished and divided between George Eliot 
as “a novelist of character,” and Thackeray 
as “a novelist of manners.” The epithet will 
pass only if we take the word in the sense 
of William of Wykeham’s motto, “ Manners 
makyth man.” 

For, as surely as there is something in the 
outward demeanour which unveils and discloses 
the person within, even so surely is there some- 
thing in behaviour, the habitual mode of speech 
and conduct, which moulds the man using it. 
A false behaviour weaves a texture of lies into 
the warp of his nature. A true behaviour 
weakens the hold of his own self-delusions, and 
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so helps him to know what he really is — which 
is good for him and for others. 

It was in this sense that Thackeray was in- 
terested in manners, and depicted them in his 
books. Go with him to a ball, and you arrive 
at the hour of unmasking; to a club, and you 
are aware of the thoughts under the conver- 
sation; to a play, and you pass behind the foot- 
lights and the paint; to a death-bed, and — well, 
do you remember the death of Helen in Pen - 
dennis? and of the Colonel in The Newcomes? 
Foolish critics speak of these last two passages 
as “ scenes.” Scenes! By Heaven! no, they 
are realities. We can feel those pure souls pass- 
ing. 

Let us follow this clew of the passion for 
reality through the three phases of Thackeray’s 
work. 


I 

At first he is the indefatigable satirist, re- 
joicing in the assault. Youth is almost always 
inclined that way — far more swift and sweep- 
ing in judgment, more severe in condemnation, 
than maturity or age. Thackeray writes much 
that is merely amusing, full of high spirits and 
pure fun, in his first period. But his main 
business is to expose false pretensions, false 
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THACKERAY AND REAL MEN 

methods, false principles in literature and life; 
to show up the fakers, to ridicule the humbugs, 
to convict the crooks of every rank and degree. 

Here, for example, is a popular fashion of 
books with criminals and burglars for heroes 
and heroines, portrayed in the glamour of ro- 
mance. Very well, our satirist, assuming the 
name of “Ikey Solomons, Esq.,” will take a real 
criminal, a murderess, and show us the manner 
of life she leads with her associates. So we 
have Catherine. Here is another fashion of 
weaving a fiction about a chevalier d’industrie, 
a bold, adventurous, conscienceless fellow who 
pursues his own pleasure with a swagger, and 
makes a brave show hide a mean and selfish 
heart. Very well, a fellow of this kidney shall 
tell his own story and show himself in his habit 
as he lives, and as he dies in prison. So we 
have The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon , Esq. Here 
are innumerable fashions of folly and falsehood 
current not only in high society, but also in the 
region of respectable mediocrity, and in the 
“world below-stairs.” Very well, our satirist, 
under the name of “Jeames Yellowplush,” or 
“M. Angelo Titmarsh,” or “Fitz-Boodle,” will 
show them up for us. So we have various 
bundles of short stories, and skits, and sketches 
of travel, some of them bubbling over with 
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fun, some of them, like Dennis Haggarty’s 
Wife , touched with quiet pathos. 

The culmination of this satiric period "is 
The Booh of Snobs , which appeared serially in 
the London Punch , 1845-46. In order to 
understand the quality and meaning of Thack- 
eray’s satire — an element which stayed with 
him all through his writing, though it was 
later subdued to its proper place — we must 
take the necessary pains to know just what 
he meant by a “snob.” 

A snob is an unreal person who tries to pass 
himself off for a real person; a pretender wdio 
meanly admires and imitates mean things; 
an ape of gentility. He is a specific variety 
of the great genus “Sham.” Carlyle, the other 
notable English satirist of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, attacked the whole genus with heavy 
artillery. Thackeray, with his light cavalry 
of ridicule, assailed the species. 

All snobs are shams, but not all shams are 
snobs. The specific qualities of the snob are 
developed only in countries where there are 
social classes and distinctions, but no insuper- 
able barriers between them. Thus in native 
India with its immutable caste, or in Central 
Africa with its general barbarism, I fancy 
it must be difficult to discover snobbism. (Yet 
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THACKERAY AND REAL MEN 

I have seen traces of it even among dogs and 
cats.) But in a country like England or the 
United States of America, where society is ar- 
ranged in different stories, with staircases be- 
tween, snobbism is frequent and flourishing. 

The snob is the man who tries to sneak up- 
stairs. He is the surreptitious climber , the per- 
son who is ashamed to pass for what he is. 

Has he been at an expensive college? He 
goes home and snubs his old friends with allu- 
sions to the distinguished society he has been 
keeping. Is he entertaining fashionable 
strangers? He gives them elaborate and costly 
fare at the most aurivorous hotel, but at home 
his wife and daughters may starve. He talks 
about books that he has never read, and pre- 
tends to like music that sends him to sleep. 
At his worst, he says his prayers on the street- 
corners and reviles his neighbour for sins which 
he himself cherishes in secret. 

That is the snob: the particular species of 
sham whom Thackeray pursues and satirizes 
through all his disguises and metamorphoses. 
He does it unsparingly, yet never — or at least 
hardly ever — savagely. There is always a strain 
of good humour in it, and often a touch of fel- 
low-feeling for the man himself, camouflaged 
under his affectations. It may not be worth 
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while — this kind of work. All satire is perish- 
able. It has no more of the immortal in it than 
the unreality which it aims to destroy. But 
some shams die hard. And while they live and 
propagate, the arrows which hit them fairly are 
not out of date. 

Stevenson makes a curious misjudgment of 
this part of Thackeray’s work, when he says 
in his essay on “Some Gentlemen in Fiction”: 

“Personally [Thackeray] scarce appeals to us 
as the ideal gentleman; if there were nothing 
else, perpetual nosing after snobbery at least 
suggests the snob.” 

Most true, beloved R. L. S., but did you 
forget that this is precisely what Thackeray 
himself says? He tells us not to be too quick or 
absolute in our judgments; to acknowledge that 
we have some faults and failings of our own; 
to remember that other people have sometimes 
hinted at a vein, a trace, a vestige of snobbery 
in ourselves. Search for truth and speak it; 
but, above all, no arrogance — faut pas monter 
sur ses grands chevaux. Have you ever read 
the end of the lecture on “Charity and 
Humour” ? 

“The author . . . has been described by The 
London Times newspaper as a writer of con- 
siderable parts, but a dreary misanthrope, 
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THACKERAY AND REAL MEN 

who sees no good anywhere, who sees the sky 
above him green, I think, instead of blue, and 
only miserable sinners around him. So we are , 
as is every writer and reader I have heard of; 
so was every being who ever trod this earth , save 
One . I cannot help telling the truth as I view 
it, and describing what I see. To describe 
it otherwise than it seems to me would be 
falsehood in that calling in which it has pleased 
Heaven to place me; treason to that conscience 
which says that men are weak; that truth must 
be told; that faults must be owned; that pardon 
must be prayed for; and that Love reigns 
supreme over all.” 

II 

With Vanity Fair begins what some one has 
called the quadrilateral on which Thackeray’s 
larger fame rests. The three other pillars are, 
Henry Esmond , Pendennis , and The Newcomes. 
Which is the greatest of these four novels? 
On this question there is dispute among critics, 
and difference of opinion, even among avowed 
Thackerayans, who confess that they 4 4 like 
everything he wrote.” Why try to settle the 
question? Why not let the interesting, illu- 
minating causerie run on ? In these furious 
days when the hysteria of world-problems 
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vexes us, it is good to have some subjects on 
which we can dispute without ranting or 
raving. 

For my part, I find Vanity Fair the strongest, 
Pendennis the most intimate. The Newcomes 
the richest and in parts the most lovable, and 
Henry Esmond the most admirable and satisfy- 
ing, among Thackeray’s novels. But they all 
have this in common: they represent a reaction 
from certain false fashions in fiction which 
prevailed at that time. From the spurious 
romanticism of G. P. It. James and Harrison 
Ainsworth, from the philosophic affectation of 
Bulwer, from the gilding and rococo-work of 
the super-snob Disraeli — all of them popular 
writers of their day — Thackeray turned away, 
not now as in his earlier period to satirize and 
ridicule and parody them, but to create some- 
thing in a different genre , closer to the facts of 
life, more true to the reality of human nature. 

We may read in the preface to Pendennis 
just what he had in mind and purpose: 

“Many ladies have remonstrated and sub- 
scribers left me, because, in the course of the 
story, I described a young man resisting and 
affected by temptation. My object was to 
say, that he had the passions to feel, and the 
manliness and generosity to overcome them. 

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THACKERAY AND REAL MEN 

You will not hear — it is best to know it — what 
moves in the real world, what passes in society, 
in the clubs, colleges, mess-rooms — what is 
the life and talk of your sons. A little more 
frankness than is customary has been at- 
tempted in this story; with no bad desire on 
the author’s part, it is hoped, and with no ill 
consequence to any reader. If truth is not 
always pleasant, at any rate truth is best, 
from whatever chair — from those whence graver 
writers or thinkers argue, as from that at 
which the story-teller sits as he concludes his 
labour, and bids his kind reader farewell.” 

It is amusing, in this age of art undressed, 
to read this modest defense of frankness in 
fiction. Its meaning is very different from 
the interpretation of it which is given by disci- 
ples of the “show-everything-without-a-fig-leaf ” 
school. 

Thackeray did not confuse reality with in- 
decency. He did not think it needful to make 
his hero cut his toe-nails or take a bath in 
public in order to show him as a real man. 
The ordinary and common physical details 
of life may be taken for granted; to obtrude 
them is to exaggerate their importance. It 
is with the frailties and passions, the faults and 
virtues, the defeats and victories of his men 
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and women that Thackeray deals. He de- 
scribes Pendennis tempted without making the 
description a new temptation. He brings us 
acquainted with Becky Sharp, enchanter esse, 
without adding to her enchantment. We feel 
that she is capable of anything; but we do 
not know all that she actually did, — indeed 
Thackeray himself frankly confessed that even 
he did not know, nor much care. 

The excellence of his character-drawing is 
that his men and women are not mere pegs 
to hang a doctrine or a theory on. They have 
a life of their own, independent of, and yet 
closely touching his. This is what he says of 
them in his essay “ De Finibus”: 

“They have been boarding and lodging with 
me for twenty months. ... I know the people 
utterly, — I know the sound of their voices.” 

Fault has been found with him (and that by 
such high authority as Mr. Howells) for coming 
into his own pages so often with personal com- 
ment or, “a word to the reader.” It is said 
that this disturbs the narrative, breaks the 
illusion, makes the novel less convincing as 
a work of art. Frankly, it does not strike me 
that way. On the contrary, it adds to the 
verisimilitude. These men and women are 
so real to him that he cannot help talking to 
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THACKERAY AND REAL MEN 

us about them as we go along together. Is it 
not just so in actual life, when you go with a 
friend to watch the passing show? Do you 
think that what Thackeray says to you about 
Colonel Newcome, or Captain Costigan, or 
Helen Pendennis, or Laura, or Ethel, or George 
Warrington, makes them fade away? 

Yes, I know the paragraphs at the beginning 
and end of Vanity Fair about the showman and 
the puppets and the box. But don’t you see 
what the parable means? It is only what 
Shakespeare said long ago: 

All the world's a stage , 

And all the men and women merely players. 

Nor would Thackeray have let this metaphor 
pass without adding to it Pope’s fine line: 

Act well your part , there all the honour lies. 

Of course, there is another type of fiction in 
which running personal comment by the author 
would be out of place. It is illustrated in 
Dickens by A Tale of Two Cities , and in Thack- 
eray by Henry Esmond. The latter seems to 
me the most perfect example of a historical 
novel in all literature. More than that, — 
it is, so far as I know, the best portrayal of 
the character of a gentleman. 

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The book presents itself as a memoir of 
Henry Esmond, Esq., a colonel in the service 
of her Majesty, Queen Anne, written by him- 
self. Here, then, we have an autobiographical 
novel, the most difficult and perilous of all 
modes of fiction. If the supposed author puts 
himself in the foreground, he becomes egotis- 
tical and insufferable; if he puts himself in the 
background, he becomes insignificant, a mere 
Chinese “property-man” in the drama. This 
dilemma Thackeray avoids by letting Esmond 
tell his own story in the third person — that 
is to say, with a certain detachment of view, 
such as a sensible person would feel in looking 
back on his own life. 

Rarely is this historic method of narration bro- 
ken. I recall one instance, in the last chapter, 
where Beatrix, after that tremendous scene in 
the house of Castlewood with the Prince, 
reveals her true nature and quits the room in 
a rage. The supposed author writes: 

“Her keen words gave no wound to Mr. Es- 
mond; his heart was too hard. As he looked at 
her, he wondered that he could ever have 
loved her. . . . The Prince blushed and bowed 
low, as she gazed at him and quitted the 
chamber. I have never seen her from that day” 

Thackeray made this slip on purpose. He 
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THACKERAY AND REAL MEN 

wanted us to feel the reality of the man who is 
trying to tell his own story in the third person. 

This, after all, is the real value of the book. 
It is not only a wonderful picture of the Age of 
Queen Anne, its ways and customs, its manner 
of speech and life, its principal personages — 
the red-faced queen, and peremptory Marl- 
borough, and smooth Atterbury, and rakish 
Mohun, and urbane Addison, and soldier- 
scholar Richard Steele — appearing in the back- 
ground of the political plot. It is also, and far 
more significantly, a story of the honour of a 
gentleman — namely, Henry Esmond — carried 
through a life of difficulty, and crowned with 
the love of a true woman, after a false one had 
failed him. 

Some readers profess themselves disap- 
pointed with the denouement of the love- 
story. They find it unnatural and disconcert- 
ing that the hero should win the mother and not 
the daughter as the guerdon of his devotion. 
Not I. Read the story more closely. 

When it opens, in the house of Castlewood, 
Esmond is a grave, lonely boy of twelve; Lady 
Castlewood, fair and golden-haired, is in the 
first bloom of gracious beauty, twenty years 
old; Beatrix is a dark little minx of four years. 
Naturally, Henry falls in love with the mother 
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rather than with the daughter, grows up as 
her champion and knight, defends her against 
the rakishness of Lord Mohun, resolves for 
her sake to give up his claim to the title and the 
estate. Then comes the episode of his infatua- 
tion by the wonderful physical beauty of Bea- 
trix, the vixen. That madness ends with the 
self-betrayal of her letter of assignation with 
the Prince, and her subsequent conduct. Es- 
mond returns to his first love, his young love, 
his true love. Lady Castlewood. Of its fruition 
let us read his own estimate: 

“That happiness which hath subsequently 
crowned it, cannot be written in words; it is 
of its nature sacred and secret, and not to be 
spoken of, though the heart be ever so full of 
thankfulness, save to Heaven and the One 
Ear alone — to one fond being, the truest and 
tenderest and purest wife ever man was blessed 


I have left myself scant space to speak of 
Thackeray’s third phase in writing — his work 
as a moralist. But perhaps this is well, for, 
as he himself said, (and as I have always tried 
to practise), the preacher must be brief if he 
wishes to be heard. Five words that go home 
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THACKERAY AND REAL MEN 

are worth more than a thousand that wander 
about the subject. 

Thackeray’s direct moralizings are to be 
found chiefly in his lectures on “The Four 
Georges,” “The English Humourists,” and in 
the “Roundabout Papers.” He was like 
Lowell: as a scholastic critic he was far from 
infallible, but as a vital interpreter he seldom 
missed the mark. 

After all, the essential thing in life for us as 
real men is to have a knowledge of facts to 
correct our follies, an ideal to guide our efforts, 
and a gospel to sustain our hopes. 

That was Thackeray’s message as moralist. 
It is expressed in the last paragraph of his 
essay “ Nil Nisi Bonum ,” written just after 
the death of Macaulay and Washington Irving: 

“If any young man of letters reads this little 
sermon — and to him, indeed, it is addressed — I 
would say to him, ‘Bear Scott’s words in your 
mind, and be good , my dear . 9 Here are two 
literary men gone to their account, and, laus 
Deo , as far as we know, it is fair, and open, and 
clean. Here is no need of apologies for short- 
comings, or explanations of vices which would 
have been virtues but for unavoidable, etc. 
Here are two examples of men most differently 
gifted — each pursuing his calling; each speak- 
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in g his truth as God bade him; each honest in 
his life; just and irreproachable in his dealings; 
dear to his friends; honoured by his country; 
beloved at his fireside. It has been the for- 
tunate lot of both to give incalculable happiness 
and delight to the world, which thanks them 
in return with an immense kindliness, respect, 
affection. It may not be our chance, brother 
scribe, to be endowed with such merit, or re- 
warded with such fame. But the rewards 
of these men are rewards paid to our service . 
We may not win the baton or epaulettes; but 
God give us strength to guard the honour of 
the flag!” 

With this supplication for myself and for 
others, I leave this essay on Thackeray, the 
greatest of English novelists, to the considera- 
tion of real men. 


118 


GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL 
WOMEN 



GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 


/^EORGE ELIOT was a woman who wrote 
full-grown novels for men. 

Other women have done and are doing 
notable work in prose fiction — Jane Austen, 
George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Stowe, 
Margaret Deland, Edith Wharton, Katharine 
Fullerton Gerould, Mrs. Humphry Ward — ■ 
the list might easily be extended, but it would 
delay us from the purpose of this chapter. Let 
me rather make a general salute to all the 
sisterhood who have risen above the indignity 
of being called “authoresses,” and, without 
pursuing perilous comparisons, go directly to 
the subject in hand. 

What was it that enabled George Eliot to 
enter the field of the English novel at a time 
when Dickens and Thackeray were at the 
height of their fame, and win a place in the 
same class with them? 

It was certainly not the hide-and-seek of 
the sex of the new writer under a pseudonym. 
You remember, opinions were divided on this 
question. Carlyle and Thackeray thought that 
the author of Scenes of Clerical Life was a man. 

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Dickens was sure that it was a woman. But 
a mystification of this kind has no interest 
apart from the primary value of the works 
of the unidentified writer in question. Nor 
does it last long as an advertisement, unless 
the following books excel the first; and, in that 
case, the secret is sure to be soon discovered. 

George Eliot’s success and distinction as 
a novelist were due to three things : first, the pre- 
liminary and rather obvious advantage of hav- 
ing genius; second, a method of thinking and 
writing which is commonly (though perhaps 
arrogantly) called masculine; third, a quick- 
ness of insight into certain things, a warmth of 
sympathy for suffering, and an instinct of sac- 
rifice which we still regard (we hope rightly) 
as feminine. A man for logic, a woman for 
feeling, a genius for creative power — that was 
a great alliance. But the womanhood kept 
the priority without which it would not only 
have died out, but also have endangered, in 
dying, the other qualities. Dickens was right 
when he said of certain touches in the work of 
this pseudonymous writer: “If they originated 
with no woman, I believe that no man ever 
before had the art of making himself mentally 
so like a woman since the world began.” 

George Eliot’s profile resembled Savonarola’s. 

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GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 

He was one of her heroes. But she was not his 
brother. She was his sister in the spirit. 

Her essential femininity was the reason why 
the drawing of her women surpassed the draw- 
ing of her men. It was more intimate, more 
revealing, more convincing. She knew women 
better. She painted them of many types and 
classes — from the peasant maid to the well- 
born lady, from the selfish white cat to the 
generous white swan-sister; from the narrow- 
minded Rosamund to the deep-hearted, broad- 
minded Romola; all types, I think, but one — 
the lewdly carnal Circe. In all her books, 
with perhaps a single exception, it is a woman 
who stands out most clearly from the carefully 
studied and often complex background as the 
figure of interest. And even in that one it 
is the slight form of Eppie, the golden-hearted 
girl who was sent to save old Silas Marner 
from melancholy madness, that shines bright- 
est in the picture. 

The finest of her women — finest not in the 
sense of being faultless, but of having in them 
most of that wonderful sacrificial quality which 
Goethe called das ewig Weibliche — were those 
upon whose spiritual portraits George Eliot 
spent her most loving care and her most graphic 
skill. 


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She shows them almost always in the reveal- 
ing light of love. But she does not dwell me- 
ticulously on the symptoms or the course of the 
merely physical attraction. She knows that 
it is there; she confesses that it is potent. But 
it seems to her, (as indeed it really .is,) far more 
uniform and less interesting than the meaning 
of love in the soul of a woman as daughter, 
sister, sweetheart, wife. Were it not for that 
inward significance there would be little to 
differentiate the physical act from the mating 
of the lower animals — an affair so common 
and casual that it merits less attention than 
some writers give it. But in the inner life of 
thought and emotion, in a woman’s intellectual 
and moral nature, — there love has its mystery 
and its power, there it brings deepest joy or 
sharpest sorrow, there it strengthens or maims. 

It is because George Eliot knows this and 
reveals it with extraordinary clearness that her 
books have an especial value. Other qualities 
they have, of course, and very high qualities. 
But this is their proper and peculiar excellence, 
and the source, if I mistake not, of their strong- 
est appeal to sanely thinking men. 

The Man Who Understood Woman is the title 
of a recent clever trivial story. But of course 
such a man is a myth, an impostor, or a self- 
deluder. He makes a preposterous claim. 

124 


GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 

Thackeray and Dickens, for example, made 
no such pretension. Some of their women are 
admirably drawn; they are very lovable, or 
very despicable, as the case may be; but they 
are not completely convincing. Thackeray 
comes nearer than Dickens, and George Mer- 
edith, I think, much nearer than either of the 
others. But in George Eliot we feel that we 
are listening to one who does understand. Her 
women, in their different types, reveal some- 
thing of that thinking, willing, feeling other- 
half of humanity with whom man makes the 
journey of life. They do not cover all the possi- 
bilities of variation in the feminine, for these 
are infinite, but they are real women, and so 
they have an interest for real men. 

Let us take it for granted that we know 
enough of the details of George Eliot’s life to 
enable us to understand and appreciate certain 
things in her novels. Such biographical knowl- 
edge is illuminating in the study of the works 
of any writer. The author of a book is not an 
algebraic quantity nor a strange monster, but 
a human being with certain features and a cer- 
tain life-history. 

But, after all, the promotion of literary 
analysis is not the object of these chapters. 
Plain reading, and the pleasure of it, is what 
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I have in mind. For that cause I love most of 
George Eliot’s novels, and am ready to main- 
tain that they are worthy to be loved. And 
so, even if my “ taken for granted” a few lines 
above should not be altogether accurate in 
these days of ignorant contempt of all that is 
“ Victorian,” I may still go ahead to speak of 
her books as they are in themselves : strong, fine, 
rewarding pieces of English fiction: that is 
what they would remain, no matter who had 
written them. 

It must be admitted at once that they are 
not adapted to readers who like to be spared 
the trouble of thinking while they read. They 
do not belong to the class of massage-fiction, 
Turkish-bath novels. They require a certain 
amount of intellectual exercise; and for this 
they return, it seems to me, an adequate rec- 
ompense in the pleasurable sense of quickened 
mental activity and vigour. 

But this admission must not be taken to 
imply that they are obscure, intricate, enigmat- 
ical, “ tough reading,” like the later books of 
George Meredith and Henry James, in which 
a minimum of meaning is hidden in a maximum 
of obfuscated verbiage, and the reader is in- 
vited to a tedious game of hunt-the-slipper. 
On the contrary, George Eliot at her best is 
126 


GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 

a very clear writer — decidedly not shallow, nor 
superficial, nor hasty, — like the running com- 
ment which is supposed to illuminate the 
scenes in a moving-picture show, — but in- 
tentionally lucid and perspicuous. Having a 
story to tell, she takes pains to tell it so that 
you can follow it, not only in its outward, but 
also in its inward movement. Having certain 
characters to depict (and almost always mixed 
characters of good and evil mingled and con- 
flicting as in real life), she is careful to draw 
them so that you shall feel their reality and 
take an interest in their strifes and adventures. 

They are distinctly persons, capable of mak- 
ing their own choice between the worse and the 
better reason, and thereafter influenced by the 
consequences of that choice, which, if repeated, 
becomes a habit of moral victory or defeat. 
They are not puppets in the hands of an in- 
scrutable Fate, like most of the figures in the 
books of the modern Russian novelists and 
their imitators. What do I care for the ever-so 
realistically painted marionettes in the fiction 
of Messrs. Gawky, Popoff, Dropoff, and Slum- 
poff? What interest have I in the minute 
articulations of the dingy automatons of Mijn- 
heer Couperus, or the dismal, despicable figures 
who are pulled through the pages of Mr. Samuel 
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Butler’s The Way of All Flesh? A claim on 
compassion they might have if they were 
alive. But being, by the avowal of their cre- 
ators, nothing more than imaginary bundles 
of sensation, helpless playthings of irresistible 
hereditary impulse and entangling destiny, 
their story and their fate leave me cold. What 
does it matter what becomes of them? They 
can neither be saved nor damned. They can 
only be drifted. There is no more human 
interest in them than there is in the predestined 
saints and foredoomed sinners of a certain 
type of Calvinistic theology. 

But this is not George Eliot’s view of life. 
It is not to her “a tale told by an idiot, full of 
sound and fury signifying nothing.” Within 
the fixed circle of its stern natural and moral 
laws there is a hidden field of conflict where 
the soul is free to discern and choose its own 
cause, and to fight for it or betray it. How- 
ever small that field may be, while it exists life 
has a meaning, and personalities are real, and 
the results of their striving or surrendering, 
though rarely seen complete or final, are worth 
following and thinking about. Thus George 
Eliot’s people — at least the majority of them — 
have the human touch which justifies nar- 
rative and comment. We follow the fortunes 
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GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 

of Dinah Morris and of Maggie Tulliver, of 
Romola, and of Dorothea Brooke — yes, and of 
Hetty Sorrel and Rosamund Vincy — precisely 
because we feel that they are real women and 
that the turning of their ways will reveal the 
secret of their hearts. 

It is a mistake to think (as a recent ad- 
mirable essay of Professor W. L. Cross seems 
to imply) that the books of George Eliot are 
characteristically novels of argument or prop- 
aganda. Once only, or perhaps twice, she 
yielded to that temptation and spoiled her 
story. But for the rest she kept clear of the 
snare of Tendenz. 

Purpose-novels, like advertisements, belong 
in the temporary department. As certain 
goods and wares go out of date, and the often 
eloquent announcements that commended them 
suddenly disappear; even so the 6 ‘burning 
questions” of the hour and age burn out, and 
the solutions of them presented in the form of 
fiction fall down with the other ashes. They 
have served their purpose, well or ill, and their 
transient importance is ended. What endures, 
if anything, is the human story vividly told, 
the human characters graphically depicted. 
These have a permanent value. These belong 
to literature. Here I would place Adam Bede 
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and Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss 
and Middlemarch, because they deal with prob- 
lems which never grow old; but not Robert 
Elsmere , because it deals chiefly with a defunct 
controversy in Biblical criticism. 

George Eliot was thirty-eight years old when 
she made the amazing discovery that she was 
by nature, not what she had thought herself, 
a philosophical essayist and a translator of 
arid German treatises against revealed religion, 
but something very different — a novelist of 
human souls, and especially of the souls of 
women. It was the noteworthy success of 
her three long short stories, Amos Barton , 
Mr. GilfiVs Love Story , and Janet's Repentance , 
printed in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857, that 
revealed her to herself and to the world. 

“ Depend upon it, [she says to her imaginary 
reader in the first of these stories,] you would 
gain unspeakably if you would learn with me 
to see something of the poetry and the pathos, 
the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the ex- 
perience of the human soul that looks out 
through dull gray eyes and speaks in a voice 
of quite ordinary tones.” 

It was the interior drama of human life that 
attracted her interest and moved her heart 
with pity and fear, laughter and love. She 
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GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 

found it for the most part in what we should 
call mediocre surroundings and on rather a 
humble and obscure stage. But what she 
found was not mediocre. It was the same dis- 
covery that Wordsworth made: 

“A grandeur in the heatings of the heart” 

By this I do not mean to say that a close 
study of the humanness of human nature, a 
searching contemplation of character, an acute 
and penetrating psychological analysis is all 
that there is in her novels. This is her predom- 
inant interest, beyond a doubt. She belongs 
to the school of Hawthorne, Henry James, 
Thomas Hardy — realists or romancers of the 
interior life. But she has other interests; and 
there are other things to reward us in the read- 
ing of her books. 

There is, first of all, an admirable skill in 
the setting of her stories. No other novelist 
has described English midland landscape, towns, 
and hamlets, better than she. No other writer 
has given the rich, history-saturated scenery 
of Florence as well. 

She is careful also not to exclude from her 
stage that messenger of relief and contrast 
whom George Meredith calls “the comic 
spirit.” Shakespeare’s clowns, wonderful as 
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some of them are, seem at times like super- 
numeraries. They come in to make a 4 c diver- 
sion. ” But George Eliot’s rustic wits and 
conscious or unconscious humourists belong 
to the story. Mrs. Poyser and Bartle Massey, 
Mrs. Glegg and Mrs. Tulliver and Bob Jakin, 
could not be spared. 

And then, her stories are really stories. 
They have action. They move; though some- 
times, it must be confessed, they move slowly. 
Not only do the characters develop, one way 
or the other, but the plot also develops. Some- 
times it is very simple, as in Silas Marner; 
sometimes it is extremely complicated, as in 
Middlemarch, where three love-stories are 
braided together. One thing it never is — 
theatrical. Yet at times it moves into an 
intense scene, like the trial of Hetty Sorrel 
or the death of Tito Melema, in which the 
very essence of tragedy is concentrated. 

From the success of Scenes of Clerical Life 
George Eliot went on steadily with her work 
in fiction, never turning aside, never pausing 
even, except when her health compelled, or 
when she needed time to fill her mind and heart 
with a new subject. She did not write rapidly, 
nor are her books easy to read in a hurry. 

It was an extraordinary series: Adam Bede 
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GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 

in 1859, The Mill on the Floss in 1860, Silas 
Marner in 1861, Romola in 1863, Felix Holt , 
the Radical in 1866, Middlemarch in 1871, 
Daniel Deronda in 1876; no padding, no 
“ seconds,” each book apparently more suc- 
cessful, certainly more famous, than its prede- 
cessor. How could one woman produce so 
much closely wrought, finely finished work? 
Of what sturdy mental race were the serious 
readers who welcomed it and found delight 
in it? 

Mr. Oscar Browning of Cambridge said that 
Daniel Deronda was the climax, “the sun and 
glory of George Eliot’s art.” From that 
academic judgment I venture to dissent. It 
is a great book, no doubt, the work of a power- 
ful intellect. But to me it was at the first 
reading, and is still, a tiresome book. Tedi- 
ousness, which is a totally different thing from 
seriousness, is the unpardonable defect in a 
novel. It may be my own fault, but Deronda 
seems to me something of a prig. Now a man 
may be a prig without sin, but he ought not 
to take up too much room. Deronda takes up 
too much room. And Gwendolen Harleth, 
who dressed by preference in sea-green, seems 
to me to have a soul of the same colour — 
a psychological mermaid. She is uncon vine- 
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ing. I cannot love her. The vivid little 
Jewess, Mirah, is the only character with charm 
in the book. 

Middlemarch is noteworthy for its extraor- 
dinary richness of human observation and 
the unexcelled truthfulness of some of its 
portraits. Mr. Isaac Casaubon is the living 
image of the gray-minded scholar and gentle- 
man, — as delicately drawn as one of Miss 
Cecelia Beaux’ portraits of aged, learned, 
wrinkled men. Rosamund Vincy is the typical 
4 ‘daughter of the horse-leech” in respectable 
clothes and surroundings. Dorothea Brooke 
is one of George Eliot’s finest sacrificial 
heroines : 


“A perfect woman , nobly planned .” 

The book, as a whole, seems to me to have 
the defect of superabundance. There is too 
much of it. It is like one of the late William 
Frith’s large canvases, “The Derby Day,” 
or “The Railway Station.” It is constructed 
with skill, and full of rich material, but it does 
not compose. You cannot see the people for 
the crowd. Yet there is hardly a corner of 
the story in which you will not find something 
worth while. 

Felix Holt, the Radical, is marred, at least for 
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me, by a fault of another kind. It is a novel 
of problem, of purpose. I do not care for 
problem-novels, unless the problem is alive, 
and even then I do not care very much for 
political economy in that form. It is too 
easy for the author to prove any proposition 
by attaching it to a noble character, or to 
disprove any theory by giving it an unworthy 
advocate. English radicalism of 1832 has quite 
passed away, or gone into the Coalition Cabinet. 
All that saves Felix Holt now (as it seems to 
me, who read novels primarily for pleasure) 
is the lovely figure of Esther Lyon, and her old 
father, a preacher who really was good. 

Following the path still backward, we come 
to something altogether different. Romola is 
a historical romance on the grand scale. In 
the central background is the heroic figure of 
Savonarola, saintly but not impeccable; in 
the middle distance, a crowd of Renaissance 
people immersed in the rich and bloody turmoil 
of that age; in the foreground, the sharp con- 
trast of two epic personalities — Tito Melema, 
the incarnation of smooth, easy-going self- 
ishness which never refuses a pleasure nor 
accepts a duty; and Romola, the splendid 
embodiment of pure love in self-surrendering 
womanhood. The shameful end of Tito, swept 
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away by the flooded river Arno and finally 
choked to death by the father whom he had 
disowned and wronged, has in it the sombre 
tone of Fate. But the end of the book is not 
defeat; it is triumph. Romola, victor through 
selfless courage and patience, saves and protects 
the deserted mistress and children of her faith- 
less husband. In the epilogue we see her like 
Notre Dame de Secours , throned in mercy and 
crowned with compassion. 

Listen to her as she talks to Tito’s son in 
the loggia looking over Florence to the heights 
beyond Fiesole. 

44 fi What is it, Lillo?’ said Romola, pulling 
his hair back from his brow. Lillo was a 
handsome lad, but his features were turning 
out to be more massive and less regular than 
his father’s. The blood of the Tuscan peasant 
was in his veins. 

44 4 Mamma Romola, what am I to be?’ he 
said, well contented that there was a prospect 
of talking till it would be too late to con Spirto 
gentil any longer. 

44 4 What should you like to be, Lillo? You 
might be a scholar. My father was a scholar, 
you know, and taught me a great deal. That 
is the reason why I can teach you.’ 

44 4 Yes,’ said Lillo, rather hesitatingly. 4 But 
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GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 

he is old and blind in the picture. Did he get 
a great deal of glory?’ 

“ ‘Not much, Lillo. The world was not al- 
ways very kind to him, and he saw meaner men 
than himself put into higher places, because 
they could flatter and say what was false. 
And then his dear son thought it right to leave 
him and become a monk; and after that, my 
father, being blind and lonely, felt unable to 
do the things that would have made his learn- 
ing of greater use to men, so that he might 
still have lived in his works after he was in 
his grave . 5 

“ ‘I should not like that sort of life,’ said 
Lillo. ‘I should like to be something that 
would make me a great man, and very happy 
besides — something that would not hinder me 
from having a good deal of pleasure.’ 

“ ‘That is not easy, my Lillo. It is only a 
poor sort of happiness that could ever come 
by caring very much about our own narrow 
pleasures. We can only have the highest 
happiness, such as goes along with being a 
great man, by having wide thoughts, and feel- 
ing for the rest of the world as well as our- 
selves; and this sort of happiness often brings so 
much pain with it, that we can only tell it 
from pain by its being what we would choose 
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before everything else, because our souls see 
it is good. There are so many things wrong 
and difficult in the world, that no man can be 
great — he can hardly keep himself from wick- 
edness — unless he gives up thinking much about 
pleasure or rewards, and gets strength to endure 
what is hard and painful. My father had the 
greatness that belongs to integrity; he chose 
poverty and obscurity rather than falsehood. 
And there was Fra Girolamo — you know why 
I keep to-morrow sacred: he had the greatness 
which belongs to a life spent in struggling 
against powerful wrong, and in trying to raise 
men to the highest deeds they are capable of. 
And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act nobly and 
seek to know the best things God has put 
within reach of men, you must learn to fix 
your mind on that end, and not on what will 
happen to you because of it. And remember, 
if you were to choose something lower, and 
make it the rule of your life to seek your own 
pleasure and escape from what is disagreeable, 
calamity might come just the same; and it 
would be calamity falling on a base mind, which 
is the one form of sorrow that has no balm 
in it, and that may well make a man say, 
“It would have been better for me if I had 
never been born.” I will tell you something, 
Lillo/ 


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GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 

“Romola paused for a moment. She had 
taken Lillo’s cheeks between her hands, and 
his young eyes were meeting hers. 

“ ‘There was a man to whom I was very 
near, so that I could see a great deal of his life, 
who made almost every one fond of him, for 
he was young, and clever, and beautiful, and 
his manners to all were gentle and kind. I be- 
lieve, when I first knew him, he never thought of 
anything cruel or base. But because he tried 
to slip away from everything that was un- 
pleasant, and cared for nothing else so much as 
his own safety, he came at last to commit some 
of the basest deeds — such as make men in- 
famous. He denied his father, and left him to 
misery; he betrayed every trust that was 
reposed in him, that he might keep himself 
safe and get rich and prosperous. Yet calam- 
ity overtook him. ’ 

“Again Romola paused. Her voice was un- 
steady, and Lillo was looking up at her with 
awed wonder. 

“ ‘Another time, my Lillo — I will tell you 
another time. See, there are our old Piero di 
Cosimo and Nello coming up the Borgo Pinti, 
bringing us their flowers. Let us go and wave 
our hands to them, that they may know we 
see them.’ ” 

Hardly one of George Eliot’s stories has a 
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conventional “happy ending.” Yet they leave 
us not depressed, but strengthened to endure 
and invigorated to endeavour. In this they 
differ absolutely from the pessimistic novels 
of the present hour, which not only leave a 
bad taste in the mouth, but also a sense of 
futility in the heart. 

Let me turn now to her first two novels, 
which still seem to me her best. Bear in mind, 
I am not formulating academic theories, nor 
pronouncing ex cathedra judgments, but simply 
recording for the consideration of other readers 
certain personal observations and reactions. 

Adam Bede is a novel of rustic tragedy in 
which some of the characters are drawn directly 
from memory. Adam is a partial portrait of 
George Eliot’s father, and Dinah Morris a 
sketch of her aunt, a Methodist woman 
preacher. There is plenty of comic relief in 
the story, admirably done. Take the tongue 
duel between Bartle Massey, the sharp-spoken, 
kind-hearted bachelor schoolmaster, and Mrs. 
Poyser, the humorous, pungent, motherly wife 
of the old farmer. 

“ ‘What!’ said Bartle, with an air of disgust. 
‘Was there a woman concerned? Then I give 
you up, Adam.’ 

“ ‘But it’s a woman you’n spoke well on, 
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GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 

Bartle,’ said Mr. Poyser. Tome, now, you 
canna draw back; you said once as women 
wouldna ha’ been a bad invention if they’d 
all been like Dinah.’ 

“ ‘I meant her voice, man — I meant her 
voice, that was all,’ said Bartle. ‘I can bear 
to hear her speak without wanting to put 
wool in my ears. As for other things, I dare 
say she’s like the rest o’ the women — thinks 
two and two ’ull come to make five, if she cries 
and bothers enough about it.’ 

“ fi Ay, ay!’ said Mrs. Poyser; ‘one ’ud think, 
an’ hear some folks talk, as the men war ’cute 
enough to count the corns in a bag o’ wheat 
wi’ only smelling at it. They can see through 
a barn door, they can. Perhaps that’s the 
reason they can see so little o’ this side on’t.’ 

“‘Ah!’ said Bartle, sneeringly, ‘the women 
are quick enough — they’re quick enough. 
They know the rights of a story before they 
hear it, and can tell a man what his thoughts 
are before he knows ’em himself.’ 

“ ‘Like enough,’ said Mrs. Poyser; ‘for the 
men are mostly so slow, their thoughts over- 
run ’em, an’ they can only catch ’em by the 
tail. I can count a stocking-top while a man’s 
getting’s tongue ready; an’ when he outs wi’ 
his speech at last, there’s little broth to be 
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made on’t. It’s your dead chicks take the 
longest hatchin’. Howiver, I’m not denyin’ 
the women are foolish: God Almighty made 
’em to match the men.’ 

“‘ Match!’ said Bartle; "ay, as vinegar 
matches one’s teeth. If a man says a word, 
his wife ’ll match it with a contradiction; if 
he’s a mind for hot meat, his wife ’ll match it 
with cold bacon; if he laughs, she’ll match him 
with whimpering. She’s such a match as the 
horsefly is to th’ horse: she’s got the right 
venom to sting him with — the right venom to 
sting him with.’ 

“ ‘What dost say to that?’ said Mr. Poyser, 
throwing himself back and looking merrily 
at his wife. 

“ ‘Say!’ answered Mrs. Poyser, with danger- 
ous fire kindling in her eye; ‘why, I say as some 
folks ’ tongues are like the clocks as run on strik- 
in’, not to tell you the time o’ the day , but because 
there’s summat wrong i’ their own inside .’ . . .” 

The plot, as in Scott’s Heart of Midlothian , 
turns on a case of seduction and child murder, 
and the contrast between Effie and Jeannie 
Deans has its parallel in the stronger contrast 
between Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris. Hetty 
looked as if she were “made of roses”; but she 
was, in Mrs. Poyser’s phrase, “no better nor 
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GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 

a cherry wi’ a hard stone inside it.” Dinah’s 
human beauty of face and voice was the true 
reflection of her inward life which 

“cast a beam on the outward shape , 

The unpolluted temple of the mind , 

And turned it by degrees to the soul's essence ” 

The crisis of the book comes in the prison, 
where Dinah wrestles for the soul of Hetty — 
a scene as passionate and moving as any in 
fiction. Dinah triumphs, not by her own 
might, but by the sheer power and beauty 
of the Christian faith and love which she 
embodies. 

In George Eliot’s novels you will find some 
passages of stinging and well-merited satire on 
the semi-pagan, conventional religion of middle- 
class orthodoxy in England of the nineteenth 
century — “ proud respectability in a gig of un- 
fashionable build; worldliness without side- 
dishes” — read the chapter on “ A Variation of 
Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet,” in The 
Mill on the Floss. But you will not find a single 
page or paragraph that would draw or drive 
the reader away from real Christianity. On the 
contrary, she has expressed the very secret of 
its appeal to the human heart through the 
words and conduct of some of her best char- 
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acters. They do not argue; they utter and 
show the meaning of religion. On me the effect 
of her books is a deepened sense of the inevi- 
table need of Christ and his gospel to sustain 
and nourish the high morality of courage and 
compassion, patience, and hope, which she so 
faithfully teaches. 

The truth is, George Eliot lived in the after- 
glow of Christian faith. Rare souls are ca- 
pable of doing that. But mankind at large 
needs the sunrise. 

The Mill on the Floss is partly an autobio- 
graphic romance. Maggie Tulliver’s character 
resembles George Eliot in her youth. The 
contrast between the practical and the ideal, 
the conflict between love and duty in the heart " 
of a girl, belong to those problematische Naturen , 
as Goethe called them, which may taste keen 
joys but cannot escape sharp sorrows. The 
centre of the story lies in Maggie’s strong devo- 
tion to her father and to her brother Tom — a 
person not altogether unlike the 6 'elder brother” 
in the parable — in strife with her love for 
Philip, the son of the family enemy. Tom 
ruthlessly commands his sister to choose be- 
tween breaking with him and giving up her 
lover. Maggie, after a bitter struggle, chooses 
her brother. Would a real woman do that? 

144 


GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 

Yes, I have known some very real women who 
have done it, in one case with a tragic result. 

The original title of this book (and the right 
one) was Sister Maggie. Yet we can see why 
George Eliot chose the other name. The little 
river Floss, so tranquil in its regular tidal flow, 
yet capable of such fierce and sudden outbreaks, 
runs through the book from beginning to end. 
It is a mysterious type of the ineluctable power 
of Nature in man’s mortal drama. 

In the last chapter, when the flood comes, 
and the erring sister who loved her brother so 
tenderly, rescues him who loved her so cruelly 
from the ruined mill, the frail skiff which carries 
them clasped heart to heart, reconciled in that 
revealing moment, goes down in the senseless 
irresistible rush of waters. 

It is not a “bad ending.” The sister’s love 
triumphs. Such a close was inevitable for 
such a story. But it is not a conclusion. It 
cries out for immortality. 

On the art of George Eliot judgments have 
differed. Mr. Oscar Browning, a respectable 
authority, thinks highly of it. Mr. W. C. 
Brownell, a far better critic, indeed one of the 
very best, thinks less favourably of it, says 
that it is too intellectual; that the develop- 
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ment and conduct of her characters are too 
logical and consistent; that the element of 
surprize, which is always present in life, is 
lacking in her people. “Our attention,” he 
writes, “is so concentrated on what they think 
that we hardly know how they feel, or whether 
. . . they feel at all.” This criticism does 
not seem to me altogether just. Certainly 
there is no lack of surprize in Maggie Tulliver’s 
temporary infatuation with the handsome, 
light-minded Stephen Guest, or in Dorothea 
Brooke’s marriage to that heady young butter- 
fly, Will Ladislaw. These things certainly were 
not arrived at by logical consistency. Nor can 
one lay his hand on his heart and say that there 
is no feeling in the chapter where the fugitive 
Romola comes as Madonna to the mountain 
village, stricken by pestilence, or in the passage 
where Dinah Morris strives for Hetty’s soul in 
prison. 

George Eliot herself tells us the purpose of 
her art — it is verity. 

“It is for this rare, precious quality of truth- 
fulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, 
which lofty-minded people despise. . . . All 
honour and reverence to the divine beauty of 
form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in 
men, women, and children — in our gardens and 
146 


GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN 

in our homes. But let us love that other 
beauty, too, which lies in no secret of propor- 
tion, but in the secret of deep human sym- 
pathy.” 

It is Rembrandt, then, rather than Titian, 
who is her chosen painter. But she does not 
often attain his marvellous chiaroscuro . 

Her style is clear and almost always firm in 
drawing, though deficient in colour. It is full 
of meaning, almost over-scrupulous in defining 
precisely what she wishes to express. Here 
and there it flashes into a wise saying, a spar- 
kling epigram. At other times, especially in her 
later books, it spreads out and becomes too 
diffuse, too slow, like Sir Walter Scott’s. But 
it never repels by vulgar smartness, nor per- 
plexes by vagueness and artificial obscurity. 
It serves her purpose well — to convey the 
results of her scrutiny of the inner life and her 
loving observation of the outer life in its hum- 
blest forms. In these respects it is admirable 
and satisfying. And it is her own — she does 
not imitate, nor write according to a theory. 

Her general view of human nature is not 
essentially different from that expressed in a 
passage which I quoted from Thackeray in the 
previous chapter. We are none of us 44 irre- 
proachable characters.” We are 44 mixed hu- 
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man beings.” Therefore she wishes to tell her 
stories 6 ‘in such a way as to call forth tolerant 
judgment, pity, and sympathy.” 

As I began so let me end this chapter — with a 
word on women. For myself, I think it wise 
and prudent to maintain with Plutarch that 
virtue in man and woman is one and the same. 

Yet there is a difference between the feminine 
and the masculine virtues. This opinion Plu- 
tarch sets forth and illustrates in his brief his- 
tories, and George Eliot in her novels. But of 
the virtues of women she gives more and finer 
examples. 


148 


THE POET OF IMMORTAL 
YOUTH 



THE POET OF IMMORTAL YOUTH 


/^\NE of the things that surprized and be- 
wildered old Colonel Newcome when he 
gathered his boy’s friends around the mahog- 
any tree in the dull, respectable dining-room at 
12 Fitzroy Square, was to hear George Warring- 
ton declare, between huge puffs of tobacco 
smoke, “that young Keats was a genius to be 
estimated in future days with young Raphael.” 
At this Charles Honeyman sagely nodded his 
ambrosial head, while Clive Newcome assented 
with sparkling eyes. But to the Colonel, sit- 
ting kindly grave and silent at the head of the 
table, and recalling (somewhat dimly) the be- 
wigged and powdered poetry of the age of 
Queen Anne, such a critical sentiment seemed 
radical and revolutionary, almost ungentle- 
manly. 

How astonished he would have been sixty 
years later if he had taken up Mr. Sidney Col- 
vin’s Life of Keats , in the “English Men of 
Letters Series,” and read in the concluding 
chapter the deliberate and remarkable judg- 
ment that “by power, as well as by tempera- 
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COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 


ment and aim, he was the most Shakespearean 
spirit that has lived since Shakespeare”! 

In truth, from the beginning the poetry of 
Keats has been visited too much by thunder- 
storms of praise. It was the indiscriminate en- 
thusiasm of his friends that drew out the equally 
indiscriminate ridicule of his enemies. It was 
the premature salutation offered to him as a 
supreme master of the most difficult of all arts 
that gave point and sting to the criticism of 
evident defects in his work. The Examiner 
hailed him, before his first volume had been 
printed, as one who was destined to revive 
the early vigour of English poetry. Black- 
wood's Magazine retorted by quoting his feeblest 
lines and calling him “Johnny Keats.” The 
suspicion of log-rolling led to its usual result in 
a volley of stone-throwing. 

Happily, the ultimate fame and influence of a 
true poet are not determined by the partizan 
conflicts which are waged about his name. He 
may suffer some personal loss by having to 
breathe, at times, a perturbed atmosphere of 
mingled flattery and abuse instead of the still 
air of delightful studies. He may be robbed of 
some days of a life already far too short, by the 
pestilent noise and confusion arising from that 
scramble for notoriety which is often unduly 
152 


THE POET OF IMMORTAL YOUTH 

honoured with the name of “ literary activity.” 
And there are some men whose days of real 
inspiration are so few, and whose poetic gift is 
so slender, that this loss proves fatal to them. 
They are completely carried away and absorbed 
by the speculations and strifes of the market- 
place. They spend their time in the intrigues 
of rival poetic enterprises, and learn to regard 
current quotations in the trade journals as 
the only standard of value. Minor poets at 
the outset, they are tempted to risk their little 
all on the stock exchange of literature, and, 
losing their last title to the noun, retire to bank- 
ruptcy on the adjective. 

But Keats did not belong to this frail and 
foolish race. His lot was cast in a world of 
petty conflict and ungenerous rivalry, but he 
was not of that world. It hurt him a little, but 
it did not ruin him. His spiritual capital was 
too large, and he regarded it as too sacred to be 
imperilled by vain speculations. He had in 
Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and Chap- 
man, Milton and Petrarch, older and wiser 
friends than Leigh Hunt. For him 

“ The blue 

Bared its eternal bosomy and the dew 
Of summer nights collected still to make 
The morning precious: beauty was awake l” 

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He perceived, by that light which comes only 
to high-souled and noble-hearted poets, 

“ The great end 

Of poesy, that it should he a friend 

To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man” 

To that end he gave the best that he had to give, 
freely, generously, joyously pouring himself 
into the ministry of his art. He did not dream 
for a moment that the gift was perfect. Flat- 
tery could not blind him to the limitations and 
defects of his early work. He was his own best 
and clearest critic. But he knew that so far 
as it went his poetic inspiration was true. He 
had faithfully followed the light of a pure and 
elevating joy in the opulent, manifold beauty 
of nature and in the eloquent significance of 
old-world legends, and he believed that it had 
already led him to a place among the poets 
whose verse would bring delight, in far-off 
years, to the sons and daughters of mankind. 
He believed also that if he kept alive his faith 
in the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth 
it would lead him on yet further, into a nobler 
life and closer to those immortal bards whose 

“ Souls still speak 
To mortals of their little week; 

Of their sorrows and delights; 

Of their passions and their spites; 

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THE POET OF IMMORTAL YOUTH 

Of their glory and their shame; 

What doth strengthen and what maim .” 

He expressed this faith very clearly in the 
early and uneven poem called “Sleep and 
Poetry,” in a passage which begins 

“ Oh, for ten years , that I may overwhelm 
Myself in poesy ! so I may do the deed 
That my own soul has to itself decreed 

And then, ere four years had followed that 
brave wish, his voice fell silent under a wasting 
agony of pain and love, and the daisies were 
growing upon his Roman grave. 

The pathos of his frustrated hope, his early 
death, has sometimes blinded men a little, it 
seems to me, to the real significance of his work 
and the true quality of his influence in poetry. 
He has been lamented in the golden verse of 
Shelley’s “Adonais,” and in the prose of a hun- 
dred writers who have shared Shelley’s error 
without partaking of his genius, as the loveliest 
innocent ever martyred by the cruelty of hostile 
critics. But, in fact, the vituperations of Gif- 
ford and his crew were no more responsible for 
the death of Keats, than the stings of insects 
are for the death of a man who has perished 
of hunger on the coast of Labrador. They 
added to his sufferings, no doubt, but they did 
not take away his life. Keats had far too much 
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virtue in the old Roman sense — far too much 
courage, to be killed by a criticism. He died 
of consumption, as he clearly and sadly knew 
that he was fated to do when he first saw the 
drop of arterial blood upon his pillow. 

Nor is it just, although it may seem generous, 
to estimate his fame chiefly by the anticipation 
of what he might have accomplished if he had 
lived longer; to praise him for his promise at 
the expense of his performance; and to rest his 
claim to a place among the English poets upon 
an uncertain prophecy of rivalry with Shakes- 
peare. I find a far sounder note in Lowell’s 
manly essay, when he says: “No doubt there 
is something tropical and of strange overgrowth 
in his sudden maturity, but it was maturity 
nevertheless.” I hear the accent of a wiser and 
saner criticism in the sonnet of one of our 
American poets: 

“ Touch not with dark regret his perfect fame. 

Sighing, ‘Had he but lived he had done so 9 ; 

Or, ‘Were his heart not eaten out with woe 
John Keats had won a prouder, mightier name ! 9 
Take him for what he was and did — nor blame 

Blind fate for all he suffered . Thou shouldst know 
Souls such as his escape no mortal blow — 

No agony of joy, or sorrow, or shame 99 

“Take him for what he was and did” — that 
should be the key-note of our thought of Keats 
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THE POET OF IMMORTAL YOUTH 

as a poet. The exquisite harmony of his actual 
work with his actual character; the truth of 
what he wrote to what his young heart saw and 
felt and enjoyed; the simplicity of his very ex- 
uberance of ornament, and the naturalness of 
his artifice; the sincerity of his love of beauty 
and the beauty of his sincerity — these are the 
qualities which give an individual and lasting 
charm to his poetry, and make his gift to the 
world complete in itself and very precious, 
although, — or perhaps we should even say be- 
cause, — it was unfinished. 

Youth itself is imperfect: it is impulsive, vi- 
sionary, and unrestrained; full of tremulous 
delight in its sensations, but not yet thoroughly 
awake to the deeper meanings of the world; 
avid of novelty and mystery, but not yet fully 
capable of hearing or interpreting the still, 
small voice of divine significance which breathes 
from the simple and familiar elements of life. 

Yet youth has its own completeness as a 
season of man’s existence. It is justified and 
indispensable. Alfred de Musset’s 

“We old men born yesterday 99 

are simply monstrous. The poetry which ex- 
presses and represents youth, the poetry of sen- 
sation and sentiment, has its own place in the 
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literature of the world. This is the order to 
which the poetry of Keats belongs. 

He is not a feminine poet, as Mr. Coventry 
Patmore calls him, any more than Theocritus 
or Tennyson is feminine; for the quality of 
extreme sensitiveness to outward beauty is not 
a mark of femininity. It is found in men more 
often and more clearly than in women. But 
it is always most keen and joyous and over- 
mastering in the morning of the soul. 

Keats is not a virile poet, like Dante or 
Shakespeare or Milton; that he would have 
become one if he had lived is a happy and lov- 
ing guess. He is certainly not a member of 
the senile school of poetry, which celebrates the 
impotent and morbid passions of decay, with a 
cafe chantant for its temple, and the smoke of 
cigarettes for incense, and cups of absinthe for 
its libations, and for its goddess not the im- 
mortal Venus rising from the sea, but the 
weary, painted, and decrepit Venus sinking in- 
to the gutter. 

He is in the highest and best sense of the 
word a juvenile poet — “ mature,” as Lowell 
says, but mature, as genius always is, within 
the boundaries and in the spirit of his own 
season of life. The very sadness of his lovely 
odes, “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” 
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“To Autumn,” “To Psyche,” is the pleasant 
melancholy of the springtime of the heart. 
“The Eve of St. Agnes,” pure and passionate, 
surprizing us by its fine excess of colour and 
melody, sensuous in every line, yet free from the 
slightest taint of sensuality, is unforgetable and 
unsurpassable as the dream of first love. The 
poetry of Keats, small in bulk and slight in 
body as it seems at first sight to be, endures, 
and will endure, in English literature, because 
it is the embodiment of the spirit of immortal 
youth . 

Here, I think, we touch its secret as an influ- 
ence upon other poets. For that it has been an 
influence, — in the older sense of the word, 
which carries with it a reference to the guiding 
and controlling force supposed to flow from the 
stars to the earth, — is beyond all doubt. The 
History of English Literature , with which Taine 
amused us some fifty years ago, nowhere dis- 
plays its narrowness of vision more egregiously 
than in its failure to take account of Gray, Col- 
lins, and Keats as fashioners of English poetry. 
It does not mention Gray and Collins at all; 
the name of Keats occurs only once, with a 
reference to “sickly or overflowing imagina- 
tion,” but to Byron nearly fifty pages are de- 
voted. The American critic, Stedman, showed 
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a far broader and more intelligent understand- 
ing of the subject when he said that “ Words- 
worth begot the mind, and Keats the body, of 
the idyllic Victorian School.” 

We can trace the influence of Keats not 
merely in the conscious or unconscious imita- 
tions of his manner, like those which are so 
evident in the early poems of Tennyson and 
Procter, in Hood’s Plea of the Midsummer 
Fairies and Lycus the Centaur , in Rossetti’s Bal- 
lads and Sonnets , and William Morris’s Earthly 
Paradise , but also in the youthful spirit of 
delight in the retelling of old tales of mythology 
and chivalry; in the quickened sense of plea- 
sure in the luxuriance and abundance of nat- 
ural beauty; in the freedom of overflowing 
cadences transmuting ancient forms of verse 
into new and more flexible measures; in the 
large liberty of imaginative diction, making all 
nature sympathize with the joy and sorrow of 
man, — in brief, in many of the finest marks of 
a renascence, a renewed youth, which charac- 
terize the poetry of the early Victorian era. 

I do not mean to say that Keats alone, or 
chiefly, was responsible for this renascence. 
He never set up to lead a movement or to found 
a school. His genius is not to be compared to 
that of a commanding artist like Giotto or 
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Leonardo or Michelagnolo, but rather to that 
of a painter like Botticelli, whose personal and 
expressive charm makes itself felt in the work 
of many painters, who learned secrets of grace 
and beauty from him, though they were not 
his professed disciples or followers. 

Take for example Matthew Arnold. He 
called himself, and no doubt rightly, a Words- 
worthian. But it was not from Wordsworth 
that he caught the strange and searching 
melody of “The Forsaken Merman,” or learned 
to embroider the laments for “Thyrsis” and 
“The Scholar-Gypsy” with such opulence of 
varied bloom as makes death itself seem lovely. 
It was from John Keats. Or read the descrip- 
tion of the tapestry on the castle walls in “Tris- 
tram and Iseult.” How perfectly that repeats 
the spirit of Keats’ descriptions in “The Eve 
of St. Agnes”! It is the poetry of the pictur- 
esque. 

Indeed, we shall fail to do justice to the in- 
fluence of Keats unless we recognize also that it 
has produced direct and distinct effects in the 
art of painting. The English pre-Raphaelites 
owed much to his inspiration. Holman Hunt 
found two of his earliest subjects for pictures in 
“The Eve of St. Agnes” and “The Pot of Basil.” 
Millais painted “Lorenzo and Isabella,” and 
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Rossetti “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” There 
is an evident sympathy between the art of these 
painters, which insisted that every detail in a 
picture is precious and should be painted with 
truthful care for its beauty, and the poetry of 
Keats, which is filled, and even overfilled, with 
minute and loving touches of exquisite elabo- 
ration. 

But it must be remembered that in poetry, as 
well as in painting, the spirit of picturesqueness 
has its dangers. The details may be multiplied 
until the original design is lost. The harmony 
and lucidity of a poem may be destroyed by in- 
numerable digressions and descriptions. In 
some of his poems — in “Endymion” and in 
“ Lamia” — Keats fell very deep into this fault, 
and no one knew it better than himself. But 
when he was at his best he had the power of 
adding a hundred delicate details to his central 
vision, and making every touch heighten and 
enhance the general effect. How wonderful in 
its unity is the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”! How 
completely magical are the opening lines of 
“Hyperion”: 

“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale 
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn , 

Far from the fiery Noon , and eve's one star , 

Sat gray -hair'd Saturn , quiet as a stone , 

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THE POET OF IMMORTAL YOUTH 

Still as the silence round about his lair; 

Forest on forest hung about his head 
Like cloud on cloud’ ’ 

How large and splendid is the imagery of the 
sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s 
Homer”! And who that has any sense of poetry 
does not recognize the voice of a young master 
in the two superb lines of the last poem that 
Keats wrote? — the sonnet in which he speaks of 
the bright star 

“ watching , with eternal lids apart, 

Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite, 

The moving waters at their priestlike task 
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.” 

The poets of America have not been slow to 
recognize the charm and power of Keats. 
Holmes and Longfellow and Lowell paid homage 
to him in their verse. Lanier inscribed to his 
memory a poem called “Clover.” Gilder wrote 
two sonnets which celebrate his “perfect fame.” 
Robert Underwood Johnson has a lovely lyric 
on “The Name Writ in Water.” 

But I find an even deeper and larger tribute 
to his influence in the features of resemblance 
to his manner and spirit which flash out here 
and there, unexpectedly and unconsciously, in 
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the poetry of our New World. Emerson was so 
unlike Keats in his intellectual constitution as to 
make all contact between them appear improb- 
able, if not impossible. Yet no one can read 
Emerson’s “ May-Day,” and Keats’ exquisitely 
truthful and imaginative lines on “Fancy,” one 
after the other, without feeling that the two 
poems are very near of kin. Lowell’s “Legend 
of Brittany” has caught, not only the measure, 
but also the tone and the diction of “Isabella.” 
The famous introduction to “The Vision of Sir 
Launfal,” with its often quoted line, 

“What is so rare as a day in June?" 

finds a parallel in the opening verses of “Sleep 
and Poetry” — 

“What is more gentle than a wind in summer?" 

Lowell’s “Endymion,” which he calls “a mys- 
tical comment on Titian’s ‘Sacred and Profane 
Love,’ ” is full of echoes from Keats, like this: 

“My day began not till the twilight fell 
And lo! in ether from heaven's sweetest well 
The new moon swam, divinely isolate 
In maiden silence, she that makes my fate 
Hajply not knowing it, or only so 
As I the secrets of my sheep may know." 

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THE POET OF IMMORTAL YOUTH 

In Lanier’s rich and melodious “Hymns of the 
Marshes” there are innumerable touches in the 
style of Keats ; for example, his apostrophe to the 

“ Reverend marsh , low-couched along the sea , 

Old chemist , wrapped in alchemy , 

Distilling silence , ” 

or his praise of the 

“Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire, 
Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire. 

Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of 
leaves” 

One of the finest pieces of elegiac verse that have 
yet been produced in America, George E. Wood- 
berry’s poem called “The North Shore Watch,” 
has many passages that recall the young poet 
who wrote 


“A thing of beauty is a joy forever ” 

Indeed, we hear the very spirit of Endymion 
speaking in Woodberry’s lines: 

“Beauty abides, nor suffers mortal change. 

Eternal refuge of the orphaned mind” 

Father John B. Tabb, who had the exquisite art 
of the Greek epigram at his command, in one of 
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his delicately finished little poems, imagined 
Sappho listening to the “Ode to a Nightingale”: 

“Methinks when first the nightingale 
Was mated to thy deathless song , 

That Sappho with emotion pale 
Amid the Olympian throng , 

Again, as in the Lesbian grove , 

Stood listening with lips apart. 

To hear in thy melodious love 
The panting s of her heart” 

Yes; the memory and influence of Keats endure, 
and will endure, becaue his poetry expresses 
something in the heart that will not die so long 
as there are young men and maidens to see and 
feel the beauty of the world and the thrill of love. 
His poetry is complete, it is true, it is justified, 
because it is the fitting utterance of one of those 
periods of mental life which Keats himself has 
called “the human seasons.” 

But its completeness and its truth depend 
upon its relation, in itself and in the poet’s mind, 
to the larger world of poetry, the fuller life, the 
rounded year of man. Nor was this forward 
look, this anticipation of something better and 
greater yet to come, lacking in the youth of 
Keats. It flashes out, again and again, from 
his letters, those outpourings of his heart and 
mind, so full of boyish exuberance and manly 
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THE POET OF IMMORTAL YOUTH 

vigour, so rich in revelations of what this mar- 
vellous, beautiful, sensitive, courageous little 
creature really was, — a great soul in the body of 
a lad. It shows itself clearly and calmly in the 
remarkable preface in which he criticizes his own 
“Endymion,” calling it “a feverish attempt, 
rather than a deed accomplished.” “It is just,” 
he writes, “that this youngster should die away: 
a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope 
that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and 
fitting myself for verses fit to live.” The same 
fine hope of a sane and manly youth is expressed 
in his early verses entitled “Sleep and Poetry.” 
He has been speaking of the first joys of his 
fancy, in the realm of Flora and old Pan: the 
merry games and dances with white-handed 
nymphs: the ardent pursuit of love, and the 
satisfied repose in the bosom of a leafy world. 
Then his imagination goes on to something 
better. 


“And can I ever bid these joys farewell? 

Yes , I must pass them for a nobler life , 

Where I may find the agonies , the strife 
Of human hearts: for lo! I see afar , 

O'er sailing the blue cragginess , a car 
And steeds with streamy manes — the charioteer 
Looks out upon the winds with glorious fear: 
And now the numerous tramplings quiver lightly 


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Along a huge cloud’s ridge: and now with sprightly 
Wheel downward come they into fresher skies, 

Tipt round with silver from the sun’s bright eyes. 

. . . And there soon appear 
Shapes of delight, of mystery and fear. 

Passing along before a dusky space 

Made by some mighty oaks: as they would chase 

Some ever-fleeting music, on they sweep. 

Lo! how they murmur, laugh, and smile, and weep: 
Some with upholden hand and mouth severe; 

Some with their faces muffled to the ear 
Between their arms; some, clear in youthful bloom. 

Go glad and smilingly across the gloom; 

Some looking back, and some with upward gaze; 

Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways 
Flit onward — now a lovely wreath of girls 
Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls; 

And now broad wings. Most awfully intent 
The driver of those steeds is forward bent. 

And seems to listen: 0 that I might know 
All that he writes with such a hurrying glow . 

The visions all are fled — the car is fled 
Into the light of heaven, and in their stead 
A sense of real things comes doubly strong. 

And, like a muddy stream, would bear along 
My soul to nothingness: but I will strive 
Against all doubting s, and will keep alive 
The thought of that same chariot, and the strange 
Journey it went.” 

How young-hearted is this vision, how full of 
thronging fancies and half-apprehended mystic 
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THE POET OF IMMORTAL YOUTH 

meanings! Yet how unmistakably it has the 
long, high, forward look toward manhood, with- 
out which youth itself is not rounded and com- 
plete! 

After all, that look, that brave expectation, is 
vital in our picture of Keats. It is one of the 
reasons why we love him. It is one of the things 
which make his slender volume of poetry so 
companionable, even as an ardent, dreamy man 
is doubly a good comrade when we feel in him 
the hope of a strong man. We cannot truly 
understand the wonderful performance of Keats 
without considering his promise; we cannot ap- 
preciate what he did without remembering that 
it was only part of what he hoped to do. 

He was not one of those who believe that the 
ultimate aim of poetry is sensuous loveliness, 
and that there is no higher law above the law of 
“art for art’s sake.” The poets of arrested de- 
velopment, the artificers of mere melody and 
form, who say that art must always play and 
never teach, the musicians who are content to 
remain forever 

“ The idle singers of an empty day ” 

are not his true followers. 

He held that “beauty is truth.” But he held 
also another article that has been too often left 
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out in the repetition of his poetic creed: he held 
“truth, beauty,” and he hoped one day to give 
a clear, full utterance to that higher, holier 
vision. Perhaps he has, but not to mortal ears. 


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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 

Wordsworth’s poetry 

\\ 7HEN this essay was written, a good many 
* * years ago, there was no available biog- 
raphy of Wordsworth except the two-volume 
Memoir by Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, 
the poet’s nephew. It is a solid work of family 
piety, admiring and admirable; but it must be 
admitted that it is dull. It is full of matters of 
no particular consequence, and it leaves out 
events in the poet’s life and traits in his char- 
acter which are not only interesting in them- 
selves but also of real importance to a vital 
understanding of his work. 

Even while reading the Memoir , I felt sure 
that he was not always the tranquil, patient, 
wise, serenely happy sage that he appeared in 
his later years, — sure that a joy in peace as 
deep and strong as his was, could only have 
been won through sharp conflict, — sure that the 
smooth portrait drawn by the reverent* hand of 
the bishop did not fully and frankly depict the 
real man who wrote the deep and moving poetry 
of Wordsworth. 


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It was about this time that the valuable 
studies of Wordsworth’s early life which had 
been made by Professor Emile Legouis, (then 
of the University of Lyons, now of the Sor- 
bonne,) were published in English. This 
volume threw a new light upon the poet’s 
nature, revealing its intense, romantic strain, 
and making clear at least some of the causes 
which led to the shipwreck of his first hopes and 
to the period of profound gloom which followed 
his return from residence in France in De- 
cember 1792. 

Shortly after reading Professor Legouis’ book, 
I met by chance a gentleman in Baltimore and 
was convinced by what he told me, (in a con- 
versation which I do not feel at liberty to repeat 
in detail,) that Wordsworth had a grand “ affair 
of the heart” while he lived in France, with a 
young French lady of excellent family and 
character. But they were parted. A daughter 
was born, (whom he legitimated according to 
French law,) and descendants of that daughter 
were living. 

There was therefore solid ground for my 
feeling that the poet was not a man who had 
been always and easily decorous. He had 
passed through a time of storm and stress. 
He had lost not only his political dreams and 
174 


THE RECOVERY OF JOY 

his hopes of a career, but also his first love 
and his joy. The knowledge of this gave his 
poetry a new meaning for me, brought it nearer, 
made it seem more deeply human. It was un- 
der the influence of this feeling that this essay 
was written in a farmhouse in Tyringham Val- 
ley, where I was staying in the winter of 1897, 
with Richard Watson Gilder and his wife. 

Since then Professor George McLean Harper 
has completed and published, (1916,) his classic 
book on William Wordsworth , His Life , Works , 
and Influence. This is undoubtedly the very 
best biography of the poet, and it contains 
much new material, particularly with reference 
to his life and connections in France. But 
there is nothing in it to shake, and on the 
contrary there is much to confirm, the opinion 
which was first put forth in this essay: namely, 
that the central theme, the great significance, 
of Wordsworth’s poetry is the recovery of joy. 

I 

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in 
the town of Cockermouth in Cumberland; 
educated in the village school of Hawkshead 
among the mountains, and at St. John’s Col- 
lege, Cambridge. A dreamy, moody youth; 

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COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 

always ambitious, but not always industrious; 
passionate in disposition, with high spirits, 
simple tastes, and independent virtues; he did 
not win, and seems not to have desired, uni- 
versity honours. His principal property when 
he came of age consisted of two manuscript 
poems , — An Evening Walk and Descriptive 
Sketches , — composed in the manner of Cowper’s 
Task . With these in his pocket he wandered 
over to France; partly to study the language; 
partly to indulge his inborn love of travel by 
a second journey on the Continent; and partly 
to look on at the vivid scenes of the French 
Be volution. But the vast daemonic movement 
of which he proposed to be a spectator caught 
his mind in its current and swept him out of 
his former self. 

Wordsworth was not originally a revolu- 
tionist, like Coleridge and Southey. He was 
not even a native radical, except as all sim- 
plicity and austerity of character tend towards 
radicalism. When he passed through Paris, in 
November of 1791, and picked up a bit of stone 
from the ruins of the Bastile as a souvenir, it 
was only a sign of youthful sentimentality. But 
when he came back to Paris in October of 1792, 
after a winter at Orleans and a summer at 
Blois, in close intercourse with that ardent and 
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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 

noble republican, Michael Beaupuy, he had been 
converted into an eager partizan of the Repub- 
lic. He even dreamed of throwing himself into 
the conflict, reflecting on 4 4 the power of one pure 
and energetic will to accomplish great things.” 

His conversion was not, it seems to me, 
primarily a matter of intellectual conviction. 
It was an affair of emotional sympathy. His 
knowledge of the political and social theories 
of the Revolution was but superficial. He was 
never a doctrinaire. The influence of Rous- 
seau and Condorcet did not penetrate far 
beneath the skin of his mind. It was the 
primal joy of the Revolutionary movement 
that fascinated him, — the confused glimmer- 
ing of new hopes and aspirations for mankind. 
He was like a man who has journeyed, half 
asleep, from the frost-bound dulness of a 
wintry clime, and finds himself, fully awake, 
in a new country, where the time for the sing- 
ing of birds has come, and the multitudinous 
blossoming of spring bursts forth. He is pos- 
sessed by the spirit of joy, and reason follows 
where feeling leads the way. Wordsworth him- 
self has confessed, half unconsciously, the se- 
cret of his conversion in his lines on The French 
Revolution as it appeared to Enthusiasts at its 
Commencement. 


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“ Oh ! pleasant exercise of hope and joy ! 

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood 
Upon our side , we who were strong in love! 

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive , 

But to be young was very heaven!” 

There was another “ bliss,” keener even than 
the dreams of political enthusiasm, that thrilled 
him in this momentous year, — the rapture of 
romantic love. Into this he threw himself 
with ardour and tasted all its joy. We do not 
know exactly what it was that broke the vision 
and dashed the cup of gladness from his lips. 
Perhaps it was some difficulty with the girl’s 
family, who were royalists. Perhaps it was 
simply the poet’s poverty. Whatever the cause 
was, love’s young dream was shattered, and 
there was nothing left but the painful memory 
of an error, to be atoned for in later years as 
best he could. 

His political hopes and ideals were darkened 
by the actual horrors which filled Paris during 
the fall of 1792. His impulse to become a rev- 
olutionist was shaken, if not altogether broken. 
Returning to England at the end of the same 
year, he tried to sustain his sinking spirits 
by setting in order the reasons and grounds of 
his new-born enthusiasm, already waning. His 
letter to Bishop Watson, written in 1793, is 
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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 

the fullest statement of republican sympathies 
that he ever made. In it he even seems to 
justify the execution of Louis XVI, and makes 
light of “the idle cry of modish lamentation 
which has resounded from the court to the 
cottage” over the royal martyr’s fate. He 
defends the right of the people to overthrow 
all who oppress them, to choose their own 
rulers, to direct their own destiny by universal 
suffrage, and to sweep all obstacles out of their 
way. The reasoning is so absolute, so relent- 
less, the scorn for all who oppose it is so lofty, 
that already we begin to suspect a wavering 
conviction intrenching itself for safety. 

The course of events in France was ill fitted 
to nourish the joy of a pure-minded enthusiast. 
The tumultuous terrors of the Revolution trod 
its ideals in the dust. Its light was obscured 
in its own sulphurous smoke. Robespierre 
ran his bloody course to the end; and when 
his head fell under the guillotine, Wordsworth 
could not but exult. War was declared be- 
tween France and England, and his heart was 
divided; but the deeper and stronger ties were 
those that bound him to his own country. 
He was English in his very flesh and bones. 
The framework of his mind was of Cumberland. 
So he stood rooted in his native allegiance, 
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while the leaves and blossoms of joy fell from 
him, like a tree stripped bare by the first great 
gale of autumn. 

The years from 1793 to 1795 were the period 
of his deepest poverty, spiritual and material. 
His youthful poems, published in 1793, met 
with no more success than they deserved. 
His plans for entering into active life were 
feeble and futile. His mind was darkened 
and confused, his faith shaken to the founda- 
tion, and his feelings clouded with despair. 
In this crisis of disaster two gifts of fortune 
came to him. His sister Dorothy took her 
place at his side, to lead him back by her 
wise, tender, cheerful love from the far country 
of despair. His friend Raisley Calvert be- 
queathed to him a legacy of nine hundred 
pounds; a small inheritance, but enough to 
protect him from the wolf of poverty, while 
he devoted his life to the muse. From the 
autumn of 1795, when he and his sister set up 
housekeeping together in a farmhouse at Race- 
down, until his death in 1850 in the cottage 
at Rydal Mount, where he had lived for thirty- 
seven years with his wife and children, there 
was never any doubt about the disposition 
of his life. It was wholly dedicated to poetry. 


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II 

But what kind of poetry? What was to be 
its motive power? What its animating spirit? 
Here the experience of life acting upon his nat- 
ural character became the deciding factor. 

Wordsworth was born a lover of joy, not 
sensual, but spiritual. The first thing that 
happened to him, when he went out into the 
world, was that he went bankrupt of joy. The 
enthusiasm of his youth was dashed, the 
high hope of his spirit was quenched. At 
the touch of reality his dreams dissolved. It 
seemed as though he were altogether beaten, 
a broken man. But with the gentle courage 
of his sister to sustain him, his indomitable 
spirit rose again, to renew the adventure of 
life. He did not evade the issue, by turning 
aside to seek for fame or wealth. His prob- 
lem from first to last was the problem of joy, 
— inward, sincere, imperishable joy. How to 
recover it after life’s disappointments, how to 
deepen it amid life’s illusions, how to secure 
it through life’s trials, how to spread it among 
life’s confusions, — this was the problem that 
he faced. This was the wealth that he desired 
to possess, and to increase, and to diffuse, — 
the wealth 

“Of joy in widest commonalty spread .” 

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None of the poets has been as clear as Words- 
worth in the avowal that the immediate end 
of poetry is pleasure. “We have no sym- 
pathy,” said he, “but what is propagated by 
pleasure, . . . wherever we sympathize with 
pain, it will be found that the sympathy is 
produced and carried on by subtle combina- 
tions with pleasure. We have no knowledge, 
that is no general principles drawn from the 
contemplation of particular facts, but what 
has been built up by pleasure, and exists in 
us by pleasure alone.” And again: “The end 
of Poetry is to produce excitement, in co- 
existence with an overbalance of pleasure.” 

But it may be clearly read in his poetry that 
what he means by “pleasure” is really an in- 
ward, spiritual joy. It is such a joy, in its 
various forms, that charms him most as he 
sees it in the world. His gallery of human 
portraits contains many figures, but every 
one of them is presented in the light of joy, — 
the rising light of dawn, or the waning light 
of sunset. Lucy Gray and the little maid in 
We are Seven are childish shapes of joy. The 
Highland Girl is an embodiment of virginal 
gladness, and the poet cries 

“Now thanks to Heaven! that of its grace 
Hath led me to this lovely place. 

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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 


Joy have I had; and going hence 
I bear away my recompence” 

Wordsworth regards joy as an actual po- 
tency of vision: 

“ With an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony , and the deep power of joy. 

We see into the heart of things.” 

Joy is indeed the master-word of his poetry. 
The dancing daffodils enrich his heart with 
joy. 

“ They flash upon that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude; 

And then my heart with pleasure fills. 

And dances with the daffodils” 

The kitten playing with the fallen leaves 
charms him with pure merriment. The sky- 
lark’s song lifts him up into the clouds. 

“ There is madness about thee, and joy divine 
In that song of thine.” 

He turns from the nightingale, that creature 
of a 4 'fiery heart,” to the Stock-dove: 

“He sang of love, with quiet blending. 

Slow to begin and never ending; 

Of serious faith, and inward glee; 

That was the song — the song for me” 

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He thinks of love which grows to use 
“ Joy as her holiest language.” 

He speaks of life’s disenchantments and weari- 
nesses as 

“All that is at enmity with joy. ” 

When autumn closes around him, and the 
season makes him conscious that his leaf is 
sere and yellow on the bough, he exclaims 

“Yet will I temperately rejoice; 

Wide is the range and free the choice 
Of undiscordant themes; 

Which haply kindred soids may prize 
Not less than vernal ecstasies , 

And passion's feverish dreams .” 

Temperate rejoicing , — that is the clearest note 
of Wordsworth’s poetry. Not an unrestrained 
gladness, for he can never escape from that 
deep, strange experience of his youth. Often, 
in thought, he 

“ Must hear Humanity infields and groves 
Pipe solitary anguish; or must hang 
Brooding above the fierce confederate storm 
Of sorrow , barricadoed evermore 
Within the walls of cities ” 

But even while he hears these sounds he will 
not be “downcast or forlorn.” He will find 
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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 

a deeper music to conquer these clashing dis- 
cords. He will learn, and teach, a hidden 
joy, strong to survive amid the sorrows of a 
world like this. He will not look for it in some 
far-off unrealized Utopia, 

“ But in the very world which is the world 
Of all of us , — the place where in the end 
We find our happiness, or not at all!” 

To this quest of joy, to this proclamation of 
joy, he dedicates his life. 

“By words 

Which speak of nothing more than what we are 
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep 
Of Death , and win the vacant and the vain 
To noble raptures.” 

And herein he becomes a prophet to his age, — 
a prophet of the secret of joy, simple, uni- 
versal, enduring, — the open secret. 

The burden of Wordsworth’s prophecy of 
joy, as found in his poetry, is threefold. First, 
he declares with exultation that he has seen 
in Nature the evidence of a living spirit in 
vital correspondence with the spirit of man. 
Second, he expresses the deepest, tenderest 
feeling of the inestimable value of the humblest 
human life, — a feeling which through all its 
steadiness is yet strangely illumined by sudden 
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gushes of penetration and pathos. Third, he 
proclaims a lofty ideal of the liberty and great- 
ness of man, consisting in obedience to law and 
fidelity to duty. 

I am careful in choosing words to describe 
the manner of this threefold prophesying, be- 
cause I am anxious to distinguish it from 
didacticism. Not that Wordsworth is never 
didactic; for he is very often entirely and 
dreadfully so. But at such times he is not at 
his best; and it is in these long uninspired 
intervals that we must bear, as Walter Pater 
has said, “With patience the presence of an 
alien element in Wordsworth’s work, which 
never coalesced with what is really delightful 
in it, nor underwent his peculiar power.” 
Wordsworth’s genius as a poet did not always 
illuminate his industry as a writer. In the 
intervals he prosed terribly. There is a good 
deal of what Lowell calls “Dr. Wattsiness,” 
in some of his poems. 

But the character of his best poems was 
strangely inspirational. They came to him 
like gifts, and he read them aloud as if wonder- 
ing at their beauty. Through the protracted 
description of an excursion, or the careful 
explanation of a state of mind, he slowly plods 
on foot; but when he comes to the mount of 
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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 

vision, he mounts up with wings as an eagle. 
In the analysis of a character, in the narra- 
tion of a simple story, he often drones, and 
sometimes stammers; but when the flash of 
insight arrives, he sings. This is the difference 
between the pedagogue and the prophet: the 
pedagogue repeats a lesson learned by rote, 
the prophet chants a truth revealed by vision. 

Ill 

Let me speak first of Wordsworth as a poet 
of Nature. The peculiar and precious quality 
of his best work is that it is done with his eye 
on the object and his imagination beyond it. 

Nothing could be more accurate, more true 
to the facts than Wordsworth’s observation of 
the external world. There was an underlying 
steadiness, a fundamental placidity, a kind 
of patient, heroic obstinacy in his character, 
which blended with his delicate, almost 
tremulous sensibility, to make him rarely fitted 
for this work. He could look axid listen long. 
When the magical moment of disclosure ar- 
rived, he was there and ready. 

Some of his senses were not particularly 
acute. Odours seem not to have affected him. 
There are few phrases descriptive of the fra- 
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grance of nature in his poetry, and so far as I 
can remember none of them are vivid. He 
could never have written Tennyson’s line about 

“ The smell of violets hidden in the green.” 

Nor was he especially sensitive to colour. 
Most of his descriptions in this region are vague 
and luminous, rather than precise and brilliant. 
Colour-words are comparatively rare in his 
poems. Yellow, I think, was his favourite, 
if we may judge by the flowers that he men- 
tioned most frequently. Yet more than any 
colour he loved clearness, transparency, the 
diaphanous current of a pure stream, the light 
of sunset 

“that imbues 

Whatever it strikes with gem-like hues ” 

But in two things his power of observation 
was unsurpassed, I think we may almost say, 
unrivalled: in sound, and in movement. For 
these he had what he describes in his sailor- 
brother, 

“ a watchful heart 
Still couchanty an inevitable ear. 

And an eye 'practiced like a blind man's touch” 

In one of his juvenile poems, a sonnet de- 
scribing the stillness of the world at twilight, 
he says: 


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“ Calm is all nature as a resting wheel; 

The kine are couched upon the dewy grass , 

The horse alone seen dimly as I pass , 

Is cropping audibly his evening meal.” 

At nightfall, while he is listening to the hooting 
of the owls and mocking them, there comes 
an interval of silence, and then 

“ a gentle shock of mild surprise 
Has carried far into his heart the voice 
Of mountain torrents.” 

At midnight, on the summit of Snowdon, from 
a rift in the cloud-ocean at his feet, he hears 

“ the roar of waters , torrents , streams 
Innumerable , roaring with one voice .” 

Under the shadows of the great yew-trees of 
Borrowdale he loves 

“ To lie and listen to the mountain flood 
Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves.” 

Si 

What could be more perfect than the little 
lyric which begins 

“ Yes, it was the mountain echo 
Solitary, clear, profound. 

Answering to the shouting cuckoo 
Giving to her sound for sound” 

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How poignant is the touch with which he 
describes the notes of the fiery-hearted Nightin- 
gale, singing in the dusk: 

“ they pierce and pierce; 

Tumultuous harmony and fierce!” 

But at sunrise other choristers make different 
melodies : 

“ The birds are singing in the distant woods; 

Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods; 

The J ay makes answer as the Magpie chatters; 

And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters ” 

Wandering into a lovely glen among the hills, 
he hears all the voices of nature blending 
together : 

“ The Stream , so ardent in its course before. 

Sent forth such sallies of glad sound that all 
Which I till then had heard, appeared the voice 
Of common pleasure: beast and bird, the lamb. 

The shepherd's dog, the linnet and the thrush 
Vied with this waterfall , and made a song, 

Which while I listened, seemed like the wild growth 
Or like some natural produce of the air 
That could not cease to be.” 

Wordsworth, more than any other English 
poet, interprets and glorifies the mystery of 
sound. He is the poet who sits oftenest by 
the Ear-Gate listening to the whispers and 
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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 

murmurs of the invisible guests who throng 
that portal into “the city of Man-Soul.” 
Indeed the whole spiritual meaning of nature 
seems to come to him in the form of sound. 

“Wonder not 

If high the transport , great the joy I felt , 

Communing in this sort through earth and heaven 
With every form of creature , as it looked 
Towards the Uncreated with a countenance 
Of adoration , with an eye of love. 

One song they sang, and it was audible. 

Most audible, then, when the fleshly ear. 

Overcome by humblest prelude of that strain. 

Forgot her functions and slept undisturbed” 

No less wonderful is his sense of the delicate 
motions of nature, the visible transition of 
form and outline. How exquisite is the de- 
scription of a high-poising summer-cloud, 

“ That heareth not the loud winds when they call; 

And moveth all together, if it move at all” 

He sees the hazy ridges of the mountains like a 
golden ladder, 

“ Climbing suffused with sunny air 
To stop — no record hath told where!” 

He sees the gentle mists 


“ Curling with unconfirmed intent 
On that green mountain's side” 

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He watches the swan swimming on Lake 
Lucarno, — 

“Behold! — as with a gushing impulse heaves 
That downy prow, and softly cleaves 
The mirror of the crystal flood. 

Vanish inverted hill and shadowy wood." 

He catches sight of the fluttering green linnet 
among the hazel-trees: 

“My dazzled sight he oft deceives, 

A Brother of the dancing leaves " 

He looks on the meadows sleeping in the spring 
sunshine: 

“ The cattle are grazing. 

Their heads never raising. 

There are forty feeding like one!" 

He beholds the far-off torrent pouring down Ben 
Cruachan: 

“ Yon foaming flood seems motionless as ice; 

Its dizzy turbulence eludes the eye. 

Frozen by distance" 

Now in such an observation of Nature as this, 
so keen, so patient, so loving, so delicate, there 
is an immediate comfort for the troubled mind, 
a direct refuge and repose for the heart. To see 
and hear such things is peace and joy. It is a 
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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 

consolation and an education. Wordsworth him- 
self has said this very distinctly, 

“One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man. 

Of moral evil and of good. 

Than all the sages can." 

But the most perfect expression of his faith in 
the educating power of Nature is given in one of 
the little group of lyrics which are bound to- 
gether by the name of Lucy, — love-songs so pure 
and simple that they seem almost mysterious in 
their ethereal passion. 

“ Three years she grew in sun and shower. 

Then Nature said , * A lovelier flower 
On earth was never sown; 

This Child 1 to myself will take; 

She shall be mine, and 1 will make 
A Lady of my own . 

Myself unll to my darling be 
Both law and impulse; and with me 
The Girl, in rock and plain, 

In earth and heaven, in glade and bower. 

Shall feel an overseeing power 
To kindle or restrain. 

The stars of midnight shall be dear 
To her; and she shall lean her ear 
In many a secret place 
Where rivulets dance their wayward round. 

And beauty born of murmuring sound 
Shall pass into her face.’” 

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The personification of Nature in this poem is 
at the farthest removed from the traditional po- 
etic fiction which peopled the world with Dryads 
and Nymphs and Oreads. Nor has it any touch 
of the “pathetic fallacy” which imposes the 
thoughts and feelings of man upon natural ob- 
jects. It presents unconsciously, very simply, 
and yet prophetically, Wordsworth’s vision of 
Nature, — a vision whose distinctive marks are 
vitality and unity. 

It is his faith that “every flower enjoys the 
air it breathes.” It is also his faith that under- 
lying and animating all this joy there is the life 
of one mighty Spirit. This faith rises to its 
most magnificent expression in the famous Lines 
composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey: 

“And 1 have felt 

A 'presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thought; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused , 

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns , 

And the round ocean and the living air , 

And the blue sky , and in the mind of man: 

A motion and a spirit , that impels 

All thinking things , all objects of all thought , 

And rolls through all things .” 

The union of this animating Spirit of Nature, 
with the beholding, contemplating, rejoicing 
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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 


spirit of man is like a pure and noble marriage, 
in which man attains peace and the spousal con- 
summation of his being. This is the first remedy 
which Wordsworth finds for the malady of de- 
spair, the first and simplest burden of his proph- 
ecy of joy. And he utters it with confidence, 

“Knowing that Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her; His her 'privilege. 

Through all the years of this our life, to lead 
From joy to joy: for she can so inform 
The mind that is within us, so impress 
With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues , 

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men. 

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life. 

Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings .” 


IV 

Side by side with this revelation of Nature, 
and interwoven with it so closely as to be insep- 
arable, Wordsworth was receiving a revelation 
of humanity, no less marvellous, no less signifi- 
cant for his recovery of joy. Indeed he himself 
seems to have thought it the more important of 
the two, for he speaks of the mind of man as 
“My haunt and the main region of my song"; 

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And again he says that he will set out, like an 
adventurer, 

“And through the human heart explore the way; 

And look and listen — gathering whence I may. 
Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain” 

The discovery of humble life, of peasant char- 
acter, of lowly, trivial scenes and incidents, as a 
field for poetry, was not original with Words- 
worth. But he was the first English poet to 
explore this field thoroughly, sympathetically, 
with steady and deepening joy. Burns had been 
there before him; but the song of Burns though 
clear and passionate, was fitful. Cowper had 
been there before him; but Cowper was like a 
visitor from the polite world, never an inhabi- 
tant, never quite able to pierce gently, power- 
fully down to the realities of lowly life and abide 
in them. Crabbe had been there before him; 
but Crabbe was something of a pessimist; he 
felt the rough shell of the nut, but did not taste 
the sweet kernel. 

Wordsworth, if I may draw a comparison 
from another art, was the Millet of English 
poetry. In his verse we find the same quality of 
perfect comprehension, of tender pathos, of ab- 
solute truth interfused with delicate beauty that 
makes Millet’s Angelus , and The Gleaners and 
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The Sower and The Sheepfold, immortal visions 
of the lowly life. Place beside these pictures, if 
you will, Wordsworth’s Solitary Reaper, The Old 
Cumberland Beggar, Margaret waiting in her 
ruined cottage for the husband who would never 
return, Michael, the old shepherd who stood, 
many and many a day, beside the unfinished 
sheepfold which he had begun to build with his 
lost boy, 

“ And never lifted up a single stone ” — 

place these beside Millet’s pictures, and the po- 
ems will bear the comparison. 

Coleridge called Wordsworth “a miner of the 
human heart.” But there is a striking peculi- 
arity in his mining: he searched the most famil- 
iar places, by the most simple methods, to bring 
out the rarest and least suspected treasures. His 
discovery was that there is an element of poetry, 
like some metal of great value, diffused through 
the common clay of every-day life. 

It is true that he did not always succeed in 
separating the precious metal from the sur- 
rounding dross. There were certain limitations 
in his mind which prevented him from distin- 
guishing that which was familiar and precious, 
from that which was merely familiar. 

One of these limitations was his lack of a 
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sense of humour. At a dinner-party he an- 
nounced that he was never witty but once in 
his life. When asked to narrate the instance, 
after some hesitation he said: “Well, I will tell 
you. I was standing some time ago at the en- 
trance of my cottage at Rydal Mount. A man 
accosted me with the question, ‘Pray, sir, have 
you seen my wife pass by?’ Whereupon I said, 
‘Why, my good friend, I didn’t know till this 
moment that you had a wife ! ’ ” The humour of 
this story is unintentional and lies otherwhere 
than Wordsworth thought. The fact that he 
was capable of telling it as a merry jest accounts 
for the presence of many queer things in his 
poetry. For example; the lines in Simon Lee , 

“Few months of life has he in store 
As he to you will telly 
For still the more he works, the more 
Do his weak ankles swell: 99 

the stanza in Peter Bell , which Shelley was ac- 
cused of having maliciously invented, but which 
was actually printed in the first edition of the 
poem, 

“Is it a party in a parlour 
Cramming just as they on earth were crammed , 
Some sipping punch — some sipping tea 
But, as you by their faces see. 

All silent and all — damned ?" 

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the couplet in the original version of The Blind 
Highland Boy which describes him as embarking 
on his voyage in 

“A household tub, like one of those 
Which women use to wash their clothes ” 

It is quite certain, I think, that Wordsworth’s 
insensibility to the humourous side of things 
made him incapable of perceiving one consider- 
able source of comfort and solace in lowly life. 
Plain and poor people get a great deal of con- 
solation, in their hard journey, out of the rude 
but keen fun that they take by the way. The 
sense of humour is a means of grace. 

I doubt whether Wordsworth’s peasant-poetry 
has ever been widely popular among peasants 
themselves. There was an old farmer in the 
Lake Country who had often seen the poet and 
talked with him, and who remembered him well. 
Canon Rawnsley has made an interesting record 
of some of the old man’s reminiscences. When 
he was asked whether he had ever read any of 
Wordsworth’s poetry, or seen any of his books 
about in the farmhouses, he answered: 

“Ay, ay, time or two. But ya’re weel 
aware there’s potry and potry. There’s potry 
wi’ a li’le bit pleasant in it, and potry sic as a 
man can laugh at or the childer understand, 
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and some as takes a deal of mastery to make 
out what’s said, and a deal of Wordsworth’s 
was this sort, ye kna. You could tell fra the 
man’s faace his potry would niver have no 
laugh in it.” 

But when we have admitted these limitations, 
it remains true that no other English poet 
has penetrated so deeply into the springs of 
poetry which rise by every cottage door, or 
sung so nobly of the treasures which are hidden 
in the humblest human heart, as Wordsworth 
has. This is his merit, his incomparable merit, 
that he has done so much, amid the hard con- 
ditions, the broken dreams, and the cruel 
necessities of life, to remind us how rich we 
are in being simply human. 

Like Clifford, in the Song at the Feast of 
Brougham Castle , 

“ Love had he found in huts where 'poor men lie," 

and thenceforth his chosen task was to explore 
the beauty and to show the power of that 
common love. 

“ There is a comfort in the strength of love; 

5 Twill make a thing endurable, which else 
Would overset the brain or break the heart ” 

He found the best portion of a good man’s 
life in 


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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 

“His little , nameless , unremembered acts 
Of kindness and of love.” 

In The Old Cumberland Beggar he declared 

“ 'Tis Nature's law 

That none 9 the meanest of created things , 

Of forms created the most vile and brute , 

The dullest or most noxious , should exist 
Divorced from good — a spirit and pulse of good , 

A life and soul , to every mode of being 
Inseperably linked.” 

And then he went on to trace, not always 
with full poetic inspiration, but still with many 
touches of beautiful insight, the good that the 
old beggar did and received in the world, by 
wakening among the peasants to whose doors 
he came from year to year, the memory of 
past deeds of charity, by giving them a sense 
of kinship with the world of want and sorrow, 
and by bestowing on them in their poverty 
the opportunity of showing mercy to one whose 
needs were even greater than their own; for, 
— the poet adds — with one of those penetrat- 
ing flashes which are the surest mark of his 
genius, — 

“Man is dear to man; the poorest poor 
Long for some moments in a weary life 
When they can know and feel that they have been , 
Themselves , the fathers and the dealers out 

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Of some small blessings; have been kind to such 
As needed kindness , for this single cause 
That we have all of us one human heart.” 

Nor did Wordsworth forget, in his estimate 
of the value of the simplest life, those pleasures 
which are shared by all men. 

“ Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room; 

And hermits are contented with their cells; 

And students with their 'pensive citadels; 

Maids at the wheel , the weaver at his loom , 

Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom 
High as the highest Peak of Furniss-fells, 

Will murmur by the hour in fox-glove bells; 

In truth the prison , unto which we doom 
Ourselves , no prison is.” 

He sees a Miller dancing with two girls on the 
platform of a boat moored in the river Thames, 
and breaks out into a song on the “ stray 
pleasures” that are spread through the earth 
to be claimed by whoever shall find them. A 
little crowd of poor people gather around a 
wandering musician in a city street, and the 
poet cries, 

“ Now, coaches and chariots ! roar on like a stream; 

Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream; 

They are deaf to your murmurs — they care not for you , 
Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue !” 

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He describes Coleridge and himself as lying 
together on the greensward in the orchard by 
the cottage at Grasmere, and says 

“ If but a bird , to keep them company , 

Or butterfly sate down , they were , I ween. 

As pleaded as if the same had been a maiden Queen." 

It was of such simple and unchartered blessings 
that he loved to sing. He did not think that the 
vain or the wordly would care to listen to his 
voice. Indeed he said in a memorable passage 
of gentle scorn that he did not expect his poetry 
to be fashionable. “It is an awful truth,” 
wrote he to Lady Beaumont, “that there 
neither is nor can be any genuine enjoyment of 
poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those 
persons who either live or wish to live in the 
broad light of the world, — among those who 
either are, or are striving to make themselves, 
people of consideration in society. This is 
a truth, and an awful one, because to be in- 
capable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of 
the word, is to be without love of human nature 
and reverence for God.” He did not expect 
that his poetry would be popular in that world 
where men and women devote themselves to 
the business of pleasure, and where they care 
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only for the things that minister to vanity or 
selfishness, — and it never was. 

But there was another world where he 
expected to be welcome and of service. He 
wished his poetry to cheer the solitary, to uplift 
the downcast, to bid the despairing hope again, 
to teach the impoverished how much treasure 
was left to them. In short, he intended by 
the quiet ministry of his art to be one of those 

“ Poets who keep the world in heart” 

— and so he was. 

It is impossible to exaggerate the value of 
such a service. Measured by any true and 
vital standard Wordsworth’s contribution to 
the welfare of mankind was greater, more 
enduring than that of the amazing Corsican, 
Bonaparte, who was born but a few months 
before him and blazed his way to glory. Words- 
worth’s service was to life at its fountainhead. 
His remedy for the despair and paralysis of the 
soul was not the prescription of a definite phi- 
losophy as an antidote. It was a hygienic 
method, a simple, healthful, loving life in fel- 
lowship with man and nature, by which the 
native tranquillity and vigour of the soul would 
be restored. The tendency of his poetry is to 
enhance our interest in humanity, to promote 
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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 

the cultivation of the small but useful virtues, 
to brighten our joy in common things, and to 
deepen our trust in a wise, kind, overruling 
God. Wordsworth gives us not so much a new 
scheme of life as a new sense of its interior and 
inalienable wealth. His calm, noble, lofty poet- 
ry is needed today to counteract the belittling 
and distracting influence of great cities; to save 
us from that most modern form of insanity, 
publicomania, which sacrifices all the sancti- 
ties of life to the craze for advertising; and to 
make a little quiet space in the heart, where 
those who are still capable of thought, in this 
age of clattering machinery, shall be able to hear 
themselves think. 


V 

But there is one still deeper element in 
Wordsworth’s poetry. He tells us very clearly 
that the true liberty and grandeur of mankind 
are to be found along the line of obedience to 
law and fidelity to duty. This is the truth 
which was revealed to him, slowly and serenely, 
as a consolation for the loss of his brief revolu- 
tionary dream. He learned to rejoice in it 
more and more deeply, and to proclaim it more 
and more clearly, as his manhood settled into 
firmness and strength. 

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Fixing his attention at first upon the hum- 
blest examples of the power of the human 
heart to resist unfriendly circumstances, as in 
Resolution and Independence , and to endure 
sufferings and trials, as in Margaret and Mi- 
chael , he grew into a new conception of the right 
nobility. He saw that it was not necessary to 
make a great overturning of society before the 
individual man could begin to fulfil his destiny. 
“What then remains ?” he cries — 

“ To seek 

Those helps for his occasion ever near 
Who lacks not will to use them; vows , renewed 
On the first motion of a holy thought; 

Vigils of contemplation; praise; and prayer — 

A stream , which, from the fountain of the heart , 
Issuing however feebly, nowhere flows 
Without access of unexpected strength . 

But , above all , the victory is sure 

For him , who seeking faith by virtue , strives 

To yield entire submission to the law 

Of conscience — conscience reverenced and obeyed. 

As God’s most intimate presence in the soul. 

And his most perfect image in the world.” 

If we would hear this message breathed in tones 
of lyric sweetness, as to the notes of a silver 
harp, we may turn to Wordsworth’s poems on 
the Skylark, — 

“ Type of the wise who soar, but never roam; 

True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home ” 

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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 

If we would hear it proclaimed with grandeur, 
as by a solemn organ; or with martial ardour, 
as by a ringing trumpet, we may read the Ode 
to Duty or The Character of the Happy Warrior , 
two of the noblest and most weighty poems 
that Wordsworth ever wrote. There is a cer- 
tain distinction and elevation about his moral 
feelings which makes them in themselves poetic. 
In his poetry beauty is goodness and goodness 
is beauty. 

But I think it is in the Sonnets that this ele- 
ment of Wordsworth’s poetry finds the broad- 
est and most perfect expression. For here he 
sweeps upward from the thought of the freedom 
and greatness of the individual man to the 
vision of nations and races emancipated and 
ennobled by loyalty to the right. How preg- 
nant and powerful are his phrases! “Plain 
living and high thinking.” “The homely 
beauty of the good old cause.” “A few strong 
instincts and a few plain rules.” “Man’s un- 
conquerable mind.” “By the soul only, the 
Nations shall be great and free.” The whole 
series of Sonnets addressed to Liberty , published 
in 1807, is full of poetic and prophetic fire. But 
none among them burns with a clearer light, 
none is more characteristic of him at his best, 
than that which is entitled London , 1802. 

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“ Milton ! thou should' st he living at this hour; 

England hath need of thee; she is a fen 
Of stagnant waters : altar , sword, and pen , 

Fireside , the heroic wealth of hall and bower , 

Have forfeited their ancient English dower 
Of inward happiness . We are selfish men; 

Oh! raise us up; return to us again; 

And give us manners , virtue , freedom, power . 

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart; 

Thou had’st a voice whose sound was like the sea: 
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. 

So didst thou travel on life's common way 
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart 
The lowliest duties on herself did lay." 

This sonnet embraces within its “ scanty 
plot of ground” the roots of Wordsworth’s 
strength. Here is his view of nature in the 
kinship between the lonely star and the solitary 
soul. Here is his recognition of life’s common 
way as the path of honour, and of the lowliest 
duties as the highest. Here is his message 
that manners and virtue must go before free- 
dom and power. And here is the deep spring 
and motive of all his work, in the thought that 
joy , inward happiness , is the dower that has 
been lost and must be regained. 

Here then I conclude this chapter on Words- 
worth. There are other things that might 
well be said about him, indeed that would 
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THE RECOVERY OF JOY 

need to be said if this were intended for a 
complete estimate of his influence. I should 
wish to speak of the deep effect which his 
poetry has had upon the style of other poets, 
breaking the bondage of “poetic diction” and 
leading the way to a simpler and more natural 
utterance. I should need to touch upon his 
alleged betrayal of his early revolutionary 
principles in politics, and to show, (if a paradox 
may be pardoned), that he never had them and 
that he always kept them. He never forsook 
liberty; he only changed his conception of it. 
He saw that the reconstruction of society must 
be preceded by reconstruction of the individual. 
Browning’s stirring lyric. The Lost Leader , — 

“Just for a handful of silver he left us. 

Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat ,” — 

may have been written with Wordsworth in 
mind, but it was a singularly infelicitous sug- 
gestion of a remarkably good poem. 

All of these additions would be necessary 
if this estimate were intended to be complete. 
But it is not, and so let it stand. 

If we were to choose a motto for Words- 
worth’s poetry it might be this: “Rejoice, 
and again I say unto you, rejoice.” And if 
we looked farther for a watchword, we might 
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take it from that other great poet, Isaiah, 
standing between the fierce radicals and sullen 
conservatives of Israel, and saying, 

“In quietness and confidence shall he your strength , 

In rest and in returning ye shall he saved.’ ’ 


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“THE GLORY OF THE 
IMPERFECT” 














“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 

ROBERT BROWNING’S POETRY 

npHERE is a striking contrast between the 
A poetry of Browning and the poetry of 
Wordsworth; and this conies naturally from 
the difference between the two men in genius, 
temperament and life. I want to trace care- 
fully and perhaps more clearly some of the lines 
of that difference. I do not propose to ask 
which of them ranks higher as poet. That 
seems to me a futile question. The contrast 
in kind interests me more than the comparison 
of degree. And this contrast, I think, can best 
be felt and understood through a closer knowl- 
edge of the central theme of each of the two 
poets. 

Wordsworth is a poet of recovered joy. He 
brings consolation and refreshment to the heart, 
— consolation which is passive strength, refresh- 
ment which is peaceful energy. His poetry 
is addressed not to crowds, but to men standing 
alone, and feeling their loneliness most deeply 
when the crowd presses most tumultuously 
about them. He speaks to us one by one, 
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distracted by the very excess of life, separated 
from humanity by the multitude of men, 
dazzled by the shifting variety of hues into 
which the eternal light is broken by the prism 
of the world, — one by one he accosts us, and 
leads us gently back, if we will follow him, into 
a more tranquil region and a serener air. There 
we find the repose of “a heart at leisure from 
itself.” There we feel the unity of man and 
nature, and of both in God. There we catch 
sight of those eternal stars of truth whose 
shining, though sometimes hidden, is never 
dimmed by the cloud-confusions of mortality. 
Such is the mission of Wordsworth to the age. 
Matthew Arnold has described it with profound 
beauty. 


“He found us when the age had hound 
Our souls in its benumbing round , 

He spoke , and loosed our heart in tears. 
He laid us as we lay at birth 
On the cool flowery lap of earth. 

Smiles broke from us and we had ease. 
The hills were round us, and the breeze 
Went o ’ er the sun-lit fields again: 

Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
Our youth returned; for there was shed 
On spirits that had long been dead. 
Spirits dried up and closely furled , 

The freshness of the early world” 

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“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


But precious as such a service is and ever 
must be, it does not fill the whole need of man’s 
heart. There are times and moods in which 
it seems pale and ineffectual. The very con- 
trast between its serenity, its assurance, its 
disembodied passion, its radiant asceticism, 
and the mixed lights, the broken music, the 
fluctuating faith, the confused conflict of actual 
life, seems like a discouragement. It calls 
us to go into a retreat, that we may find our- 
selves and renew our power to live. But 
there are natures which do not easily adapt 
themselves to a retreat, — natures which crave 
stimulus more than consolation, and look for 
a solution of life’s problem that can be worked 
out while they are in motion. They do not 
wish, perhaps they are not able, to withdraw 
themselves from active life even for the sake 
of seeing it more clearly. 

Wordsworth’s world seems to them too bare, 
too still, too monotonous. The rugged and 
unpopulous mountains, the lonely lakes, the 
secluded vales, do not attract them as much 
as the fertile plain with its luxuriant vegeta- 
tion, the whirling city, the crowded highways 
of trade and pleasure. Simplicity is strange 
to them; complexity is their native element. 
They want music, but they want it to go with 
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them in the march, the parade, the festal 
procession. The poet for them must be in 
the world, though he need not be altogether 
of it. He must speak of the rich and varied 
life of man as one who knows its artificial as 
well as its natural elements, — palaces as well 
as cottages, courts as well as sheepfolds. Art 
and politics and literature and science and 
churchmanship and society, — all must be fa- 
miliar to him, material to his art, significant 
to his interpretation. His message must be 
modern and militant. He must not disregard 
doubt and rebellion and discord, but take them 
into his poetry and transform them. He must 
front 

“ The cloud of mortal destiny” 

and make the most of the light that breaks 
through it. Such a poet is Robert Browning; 
and his poetry is the direct answer to at least 
one side of the modern Zeitgeist , restless, cu- 
rious, self-conscious, energetic, the active, 
questioning spirit. 


I 

Browning’s poetic work-time covered a period 
of about fifty-six years, (1833-1889,) and dur- 
ing this time he published over thirty volumes 
216 


“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


of verse, containing more than two hundred 
and thirty poems, the longest, The Ring and the 
Book , extending to nearly twenty-one thousand 
lines. It was an immense output, greater 
I think, in mass, than that of almost any other 
English poet except Shakespeare. The mere 
fact of such productiveness is worth noting, be- 
cause it is a proof of the activity of the poet’s 
mind, and also because it may throw some light 
upon certain peculiarities in the quality of his 
work. 

Browning not only wrote much himself, 
he was also the cause of much writing in others. 
Commentaries, guide-books, handbooks, and 
expositions have grown up around his poetry 
so fast that the vines almost hide the trellis. 
The Browning Literature now demands not 
merely a shelf, but a whole case to itself in 
the library. It has come to such a pass that 
one must choose between reading the books 
that Browning wrote and the books that other 
people have written about Browning. Life 
is too short for both. 

A reason, if not a justification, for this growth 
of a locksmith literature about his work is 
undoubtedly to be found in what Mr. Augustine 
Birrell calls “The Alleged Obscurity of Mr. 
Browning’s Poetry.” The adjective in this 
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happy title indicates one of the points in the 
voluminous discussion. Does the difficulty in 
understanding Browning lie in him, or in his 
readers? Is it an accidental defect of his 
style, or a valuable element of his art, or an 
inherent profundity of his subject that makes 
him hard to read? Or does the trouble reside 
altogether in the imagination of certain readers, 
or perhaps in their lack of it? This question 
was debated so seriously as to become at times 
almost personal and threaten the unity of 
households if not the peace of nations. Brown- 
ing himself was accustomed to tell the story 
of a young man who could not read his poetry, 
falling deeply in love with a young woman 
who would hardly read anything else. She 
made it a condition of her favour that her 
lover should learn to love her poet, and there- 
fore set the marriage day at a point beyond 
the time when the bridegroom could present 
himself before her with convincing evidence 
that he had perused the works of Browning 
down to the last line. Such was the strength 
of love that the condition was triumphantly 
fulfilled. The poet used to tell with humourous 
satisfaction that he assisted in person at the 
wedding of these two lovers whose happiness 
he had unconsciously delayed and accom- 
plished. 


218 


“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


But an incident like this does not contribute 
much to the settlement of the controversy 
which it illustrates. Love is a notorious 
miracle-worker. The question of Browning’s 
obscurity is still debatable; and whatever may 
be said on one side or the other, one fact must 
be recognized: it is not yet quite clear whether 
his poetry is clear or not. 

To this fact I would trace the rise and 
flourishing of Browning Societies in consider- 
able abundance, during the late Victorian Era, 
especially near Boston. The enterprise of read- 
ing and understanding Browning presented 
itself as an affair too large and difficult for the 
intellectual capital of any private person. Cor- 
porations were formed, stock companies of 
intelligence were promoted, for the purpose of 
working the field of his poetry. The task 
which daunted the solitary individual was 
courageously undertaken by phalanxes and 
cheerfully pursued in fellowship. Thus the ob- 
scurity, alleged or actual, of the poet’s 
writing, having been at first a hindrance, after- 
wards became an advertisement to his fame. 
The charm of the enigma, the fascination of 
solving riddles, the pleasure of understanding 
something which other people at least professed 
to be unable to understand, entered distinctly 
into the growth of his popularity. A Brown- 
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in g cult, a Browning propaganda, came into 
being and toiled tremendously. 

One result of the work of these clubs and 
societies is already evident: they have done 
much to remove the cause which called them 
into being. It is generally recognized that a 
considerable part of Browning’s poetry is not 
really so difficult after all. It can be read and 
enjoyed by any one whose mind is in working 
order. Those innocent and stupid Victorians 
were wrong about it. We alert and sagacious 
George-the-Fifthians need some tougher poetry 
to try our mettle. So I suppose the Browning 
Societies, having fulfilled their function, will 
gradually fade away, — or perhaps transfer their 
attention to some of those later writers who 
have put obscurity on a scientific basis and 
raised impenetrability to a fine art. Meantime 
I question whether all the claims which were 
made on behalf of Browning in the period of 
propaganda will be allowed at their face value. 
For example, that The Ring and the Booh is 
“the greatest work of creative imagination 
that has appeared since the time of Shake- 
speare,” * and that A Grammarian's Funeral 
is “the most powerful ode in English, the 


* Reverend A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology , 
p. 384. 

220 


“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


mightiest tribute ever paid to a man,” * and 
that Browning’s “style as it stands is God- 
made, not Browning-made,” f appear even now 
like drafts on glory which must be discounted 
before they are paid. Nor does it seem 
probable that the general proposition which 
was sometimes advanced by extreme Brown- 
ingites, (and others,) to the effect that all 
great poetry ought to be hard to read, and that 
a poem which is easy cannot be great, will stand 
the test of time. Milton’s Comus , Gray’s 
Elegy , Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations 
of Immortality , Shelley’s Sky-lark , Keats’ Gre- 
cian Urn , and Tennyson’s Guinevere cannot be 
reduced to the rank of minor verse by such a 
formula. 

And yet it must be said that the very extrava- 
gance of the claims which were made for Brown- 
ing, the audacity of enthusiasm which he in- 
spired in his expositors, is a proof of the reality 
and the potency of his influence. Men are 
not kindled where there is no fire. Men do 
not keep on guessing riddles unless the answers 
have some interest and value. A stock com- 
pany cannot create a prophet out of straw. 


* John Jay Chapman. Emerson and Other Essays , p. 195. 
fj. H. Nettleship, Robert Browning , Essays and Thoughts, 
p. 292. 


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Browning must have had something important 
to say to the age, and he must have succeeded 
in saying it in a way which was suitable, in 
spite of its defects, to convey his message, 
else we may be sure his age never would have 
listened to him, even by select companies, nor 
discussed him, even in a partizan temper, nor 
felt his influence, even at second-hand. 

What was it, then, that he had to say, and 
how did he say it? What was the theme of 
his poetry, what the method by which he found 
it, what the manner in which he treated it, 
and what the central element of his disposition 
by which the development of his genius was 
impelled and guided? These are the questions, 
— questions of fact rather than of theory, — that 
particularly interest me in regard to Browning. 
And I hope it may be possible to consider them 
from a somewhat fresh point of view, and with- 
out entering into disturbing and unprofitable 
comparisons of rank with Shakespeare and the 
other poets. 

But there is no reason why the answers to 
these questions should be concealed until the 
end of the chapter. It may be better to state 
them now, in order that we may be able to test 
them as we go on, and judge whether they are 
justified and how far they need to be quali- 
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fied. There is a particular reason for taking 
this course, in the fact that Browning changed 
very little in the process of growth. There 
were alterations in his style, but there was no 
real alteration in the man, nor in his poetry. 
His first theme was his last theme. His early 
manner of treatment was his latest manner 
of treatment. What he said at the beginning 
he said again at the end. With the greatest 
possible variety of titles he had but one main 
topic; with the widest imaginable range of 
subjects, he used chiefly one method and 
reached but one conclusion; with a nature 
of almost unlimited breadth he was always un- 
der control of one central impulse and loyal 
to one central quality. Let me try, then, to 
condense the general impression into a para- 
graph and take up the particulars afterwards, 
point by point. 

The clew to Browning’s mind, it seems to me, 
is vivid and inexhaustible curiosity, dominated 
by a strangely steady optimism. His topic is 
not the soul, in the abstract, but souls in the 
concrete. His chosen method is that of spiri- 
tual drama, and for the most part, monodrama. 
His manner is the intense, subtle, passionate 
style of psychological realism. His message, 
uttered through the lips of a hundred imaginary 
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characters, but always with his own accent, — 
his message is “the Glory of the Imperfect.” 

II 

The best criticisms of the poets have usually 
come from other poets, and often in the form 
of verse. Landor wrote of Browning, 

“Since Chaucer was alive and hale 
No man hath walked along our roads with step 
So active , so inquiring eye , or tongue 
So varied in discourse .” 

This is a thumb-nail sketch of Browning’s 
personality, — not complete, but very lifelike. 
And when we add to it Landor’s prose saying 
that “his is the surest foot since Chaucer’s, 
that has waked the echoes from the difficult 
places of poetry and of life” we have a suffi- 
ciently plain clew to the unfolding of Brown- 
ing’s genius. Unwearying activity, intense 
curiosity, variety of expression, and a pre- 
dominant interest in the difficult places of 
poetry and of life, — these were the striking 
characteristics of his mind. In his heart a 
native optimism, an unconquerable hopeful- 
ness, was the ruling factor. But of that I shall 
not speak until later, when we come to con- 
sider his message. For the present we are 
224 


“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 

looking simply for the mainspring of his im- 
mense intellectual energy. 

When I say that the clew to Browning’s 
mind is to be found in his curiosity, I do not 
mean inquisitiveness, but a very much larger 
and nobler quality, for which we have no good 
word in English, — something which corresponds 
with the German Wissbegier , as distinguished 
from Neugier: an ardent desire to know things 
as they are, to penetrate as many as possible 
of the secrets of actual life. This, it seems to 
me, is the key to Browning’s intellectual dis- 
position. He puts it into words in his first 
poem Pauline , where he makes the nameless 
hero speak of his life as linked to 

“ a principle of restlessness 
Which would be all, have , see , know , taste, feel , all — 
This is myself; and I should thus have been 
Though gifted lower than the meanest soul." 

Paracelsus is only an expansion of this theme 
in the biography of a soul. In Fra Lippo Lippi 
the painter says: 

“God made it all l 

For what ? Do you feel thankful , ay or no. 

For this fair town's face, yonder river's line. 

The mountain round it and the sky above. 

Much more the figures of man, woman, child. 

These are the frame to ? What's it all about ? 

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To be 'passed over , despised? Or dwelt upon , 
Wondered at ? oh, this last of course 1 — you say . 

But why not do as well as say, paint these 
Just as they are, careless what comes of it ? 

God's works — paint any one and count it crime 
To let a truth slip. 

. . . This world's no blot for us. 

Nor blank; it means intensely and means good: 

To find its meaning is my meat and drink ” 

No poet was ever more interested in life than 
Browning, and whatever else may be said of 
his poetry it must be admitted that it is very 
interesting. He touches all sides of human 
activity and peers into the secret places of 
knowledge. He enters into the life of musi- 
cians in Abt Vogler , Master Hugues of Saxe - 
Gotha , A Toccata of Galuppi’s , and Charles 
Avison; into the life of painters in Andrea del 
Sarto , Pictor Ignotus , Fra Lippo Lippi , Old 
Pictures in Florence , Gerard de Lairesse , Pac- 
chiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper , 
and Francis Furini; into the life of scholars in 
A Grammarian' s Funeral and Fust and his 
Friends; into the life of politicians in Prince 
Hohenstiel-Schwangau and George Bubb Doding- 
ton; into the life of eccelsiastics in the Soliloquy 
of the Spanish Cloister , Bishop Blougram s 
Apology , The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint 
Praxed's Church , and The Ring and the Book; 

226 


“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


and he makes excursions into all kinds of by- 
ways and crooked corners of life in such poems 
as Mr. Sludge , the Medium , Porphyria's Lover , 
Mesmerism , Johannes Agricola in Meditation , 
Pietro of Abano , Ned Bratts, Jochanan Hak - 
kadosh , and so forth. 

Merely to read a list of such titles is to have 
evidence of Browning’s insatiable curiosity. 
It is evident also that he has a fondness for out- 
of-the-way places. He wants to know, even 
more than he wants to enjoy. If Wordsworth 
is the poet of the common life, Browning is 
the poet of the uncommon life. Extraordinary 
situations and eccentric characters attract him. 
Even when he is looking at some familiar 
scene, at some commonplace character, his 
effort is to discover something that shall prove 
that it is not familiar, not commonplace, — 
a singular detail, a striking feature, a mark of 
individuality. This gives him more pleasure 
than any distant vision of an abstraction or 
a general law. 

“All that I know 
Of a certain star 
Is, it can throw 

{Like the angled spar) 

Now a dart of red. 

Now a dart of blue; 

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Till my friends have said 
They would fain see , too. 

My star that dartles the red and the blue ! 

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower hangs furled; 

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. 
What matter to me if their star is a world? 

Mine has opened its soul to me, therefore I love it” 

One consequence of this penetrating, personal 
quality of mind is that Browning’s pages teem 
with portraits of men and women, which are 
like sculptures and paintings of the Renaissance. 
They are more individual than they are typical. 
There is a peculiarity about each one of them 
which almost makes us forget to ask whether 
they have any general relation and value. The 
presentations are so sharp and vivid that their 
representative quality is lost. 

If Wordsworth is the Millet of poetry. Brown- 
ing is the Holbein or the Denner. He never 
misses the mole, the wrinkle, the twist of the 
eyebrow, which makes the face stand out 
alone, the sudden touch of self -revelation which 
individualizes the character. Thus we find 
in Browning’s poetry few types of humanity, 
but plenty of men. 

Yet he seldom, if ever, allows us to forget 
the background of society. His figures are 
far more individual than Wordsworth’s, but 
228 


“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


far less solitary. Behind each of them we feel 
the world out of which they have come and 
to which they belong. There is a sense of 
crowded life surging through his poetry. The 
city, with all that it means, is not often com- 
pletely out of view. “Shelley’s characters,” 
says a thoughtful essayist, “are creatures of 
wave and sky; Wordsworth’s of green English 
fields; Browning’s move in the house, the 
palace, the street.” * In many of them, even 
when they are soliloquizing, there is a curious 
consciousness of opposition, of conflict. They 
seem to be defending themselves against un- 
seen adversaries, justifying their course against 
the judgment of absent critics. Thus Bishop 
Blougram, while he talks over the walnuts 
and the wine to Mr. Gigadibs, the sceptical 
hack-writer, has a worldful of religious conser- 
vatives and radicals in his eye and makes his 
half-cynical, wholly militant, apology for ag- 
nostic orthodoxy to them. The old huntsman, 
in The Flight of the Duchess , is maintaining the 
honour of his fugitive mistress against the 
dried-up, stiff, conventional society from which 
she has eloped with the Gypsies. Andrea del 
Sarto, looking at the soulless fatal beauty of 


* Miss Vida D. Scudder, The Life of the Spirit in Modern Eng- 
lish Poets. 

£29 


COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 


his Lucrezia, and meditating on the splendid 
failure of his art, cries out to Rafael and Michel- 
angelo and all his compeers to understand and 
judge him. 

Even when Browning writes of romantic 
love, (one of his two favourite subjects), he 
almost always heightens its effect by putting 
it in relief against the ignorance, the indiffer- 
ence, the busyness, or the hostility of the great 
world. In Cristina and Evelyn Hope half the 
charm of the passion lies in the feeling that it 
means everything to the lover though no one 
else in the world may know of its existence. 
Porphyria? s Lover , in a fit of madness, kills 
his mistress to keep her from going back to 
the world which would divide them. The 
sweet searching melody of In a Gondola plays 
itself athwart a sullen distant accompaniment 
of Venetian tyranny and ends with a swift 
stroke of vengeance from the secret Three. 

Take, for an example of Browning’s way of 
enhancing love by contrast, that most exquisite 
and subtle lyric called Love Among the Ruins . 

“ Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles 
Miles and miles 

On the solitary pastures where our sheep 
Half asleep 

Tinkle homeward through the twilight , stay or stop 
As they crop — 

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“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


Was the site once of a city great and gay 
(So they say) 

Of our country's very capital , its prince 
Ages since 

Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far 
Peace or war . 

And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve 
Smiles to leave 

To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece 
In such peace. 

And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray 
Melt away — 

That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair 
Waits me there 

In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul 
For the goal. 

When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless , 
dumb 

Till I come. 

In one year they sent a million fighters forth 
South and North, 

And they built their gods a brazen pillar high 
As the sky. 

Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force — 

Gold of course. 

Oh heart! Oh blood that freezes, blood that burns ! 
Earth's returns 

For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin! 

Shut them in. 

With their triumphs and their glories and the rest ! 

Love is best." 

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III 

"Love is best!” That is one of the cardinal 
points of Browning’s creed. He repeats it in 
a hundred ways: tragically in A Blot in the 
’ Scutcheon ; sentimentally in A Lover’s Quarrel , 
Two in the Campagna, The Last Ride Together; 
heroically in Colombes Birthday; in the form 
of a paradox in The Statue and the Bust; as a 
personal experience in By the Fireside , One Word 
More , and at the end of the prelude to The 
Ring and the Book . 

“For life , with all it yields of joy and woe 

And hope and fear, . . . 

Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love” 

But it must be confessed that he does not often 
say it as clearly, as quietly, as beautifully 
as in Love Among the Ruins. For his chosen 
method is dramatic and his natural manner is 
psychological. So ardently does he follow this 
method, so entirely does he give himself up 
to this manner that his style 

“is subdued 

To what it works in, like the dyer* s hand” 

In the dedicatory note to Sordello , written in 
1863, he says, "My stress lay in the incidents 
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“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 

in the development of a soul ; little else is worth 
study.” He felt intensely 

“How the world is made for each of us! 

How all we 'perceive and know in it 
Tends to some moment 9 s product thus. 

When a soul declares itself — to wit. 

By its fruit, the thing it does ! ” 

In One Word More he describes his own poetry 
with keen insight: 

“Love, you saw me gather men and women. 

Live or dead or fashioned hy my fancy. 

Enter each and all and use their service. 

Speak from every mouth, — the speech a poem 99 

It is a mistake to say that Browning is a 
metaphysical poet: he is a psychological poet. 
His interest does not lie in the abstract prob- 
lems of time and space, mind and matter, 
divinity and humanity. It lies in the con- 
crete problems of opportunity and crisis, flesh 
and spirit, man the individual and God the 
person. He is an anatomist of souls. 

“ Take the least man of all mankind, as I; 

Look at his head and heart, find how and why 
He differs from his fellows utterly 99 * 

But his way of finding out this personal 
equation is not by observation and reflection. 

* Epilogue to Dramatis Personae. 

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It is by throwing himself into the character 
and making it reveal itself by intricate self- 
analysis or by impulsive action. What his 
poetry lacks is the temperate zone. He has the 
arctic circle of intellect and the tropics of 
passion. But he seldom enters the inter- 
mediate region of sentiment, reflection, sym- 
pathy, equable and prolonged feeling. There- 
fore it is that few of his poems have the 
power of “sinking inward from thought to 
thought” as Wordsworth’s do. They surprise 
us, rouse us, stimulate us, more than they rest 
us. He does not penetrate with a mild and 
steady light through the portals of the human 
heart, making them transparent. He flings 
them wide open suddenly, and often the gates 
creak on their hinges. He is forever tying 
Gordian knots in the skein of human life and 
cutting them with the sword of swift action or 
intense passion. His psychological curiosity 
creates the difficulties, his intuitive optimism 
solves them. 


IV 

The results of this preoccupation with such 
subjects and of this manner of dealing with 
them may be recognized very easily in Brown- 
ing’s work. 


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“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


First of all they turned him aside from be- 
coming a great Nature-poet, though he was 
well fitted to be one. It is not that he loves 
Nature’s slow and solemn pageant less, but 
that he loves man’s quick and varied drama 
more. His landscapes are like scenery for 
the stage. They accompany the unfolding 
of the plot and change with it, but they 
do not influence it. His observation is as 
keen, as accurate as Wordsworth’s or Tenny- 
son’s, but it is less steady, less patient, less 
familiar. It is the observation of one who 
passes through the country but does not stay 
to grow intimate with it. The forms of Na- 
ture do not print themselves on his mind; 
they flash vividly before him, and come and go. 
Usually it is some intense human feeling that 
makes the details of the landscape stand out 
so sharply. In Pippa Passes, it is in the ec- 
stasy of love that Ottima and Sebald notice 

“ The garden's silence: even the single bee 
Persisting in his toil , suddenly stopped , 

And where he hid you only could surmise 
By some campanula chalice set a-swing .” 

It is the sense of guilty passion that makes 
the lightning-flashes, burning through the pine- 
forest, seem like dagger-strokes, — 

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“ As if God's messenger through the closed wood screen 
Plunged and re-plunged his weapon at a venture , 
Feeling for guilty thee and me. 19 

In Home Thoughts from Abroad , it is the exile’s 
deep homesickness that brings the quick, del- 
icate vision before his eyes: 

“ Oh, to be in England 
Now that April's there , 

And whoever wakes in England 
Sees, some morning, unaware. 

That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf 
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf. 

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough 
In England — now!" 

But Browning’s touches of Nature are not 
always as happy as this. Often he crowds 
the details too closely, and fails to blend them 
with the ground of the picture, so that the 
tonality is destroyed and the effect is distract- 
ing. The foreground is too vivid: the aerial 
perspective vanishes. There is an impression- 
ism that obscures the reality. As Amiel says: 
“Under pretense that we want to study it 
more in detail, we pulverize the statue.” 

Browning is at his best as a Nature-poet 
in sky-scapes, like the description of daybreak 
in Pippa Passes , the lunar rainbow in Christmas 
Eve , and the Northern Lights in Easter Day; 
and also in a kind of work which might be 
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“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


called symbolic landscape, where the imagi- 
native vision of Nature is made to represent a - 
human experience. A striking example of this 
work is the scenery of Childe Roland , reflecting 
as in a glass the grotesque horrors of spiritual 
desolation. There is a passage in Sordello 
which makes a fertile landscape, sketched in a 
few swift lines, the symbol of Sordello’s luxu- 
riant nature; and another in Norbert’s speech, 
in In a Balcony , which uses the calm self-aban- 
donment of the world in the tranquil evening 
light as the type of the sincerity of the heart 
giving itself up to love. But perhaps as good 
an illustration as we can find of Browning’s 
quality as a Nature-poet, is a little bit of 
mystery called Meeting at Night. 

“ The gray sea and the long black land; 

And the yellow half-moon , large and low; 

And the startled little waves that leap 
In fiery ringlets from their sleep, 

As I gain the cove with pushing prow. 

And quench its speed in the slushy sand . 

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; 

Three fields to cross till a farm appears; 

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch 
And the blue spirt of a lighted match, 

And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears , 

Than the two hearts beating each to each l ” 

This is the landscape of the drama. 

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A second result of Browning’s preoccupation 
with dramatic psychology is the close con- 
centration and “ alleged obscurity” of his style. 
Here again I evade the critical question whether 
the obscurity is real, or whether it is only a 
natural and admirable profundity to which 
an indolent reviewer has given a bad name. 
That is a question which Posterity must 
answer. But for us the fact remains that some 
of his poetry is hard to read; it demands close 
attention and strenuous effort; and when we 
find a piece of it that goes very easily, like The 
Pied Piper of Hamelin , How They brought the 
Good News from Ghent to Aix, Herve Riel , or 
the stirring Cavalier Tunes , we are conscious of 
missing the sense of strain which we have 
learned to associate with the reading of 
Browning. 

One reason for this is the predominance of 
curiosity over harmony in his disposition. He 
tries to express the inexpressible, to write the 
unwritable. As Dr. Johnson said of Cowley, 
he has the habit “of pursuing his thoughts to 
the last ramifications, by which he loses the 
grandeur of generality.” Another reason is 
the fluency, the fertility, the haste of his genius, 
and his reluctance, or inability, to put the 
brakes on his own productiveness. 

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It seems probable that if Browning had been 
able to write more slowly and carefully he might 
have written with more lucidity. There was 
a time when he made a point of turning off a 
poem a day. It is doubtful whether the story 
of The Ring and the Booh gains in clearness by 
being told by eleven different persons, all of 
them inclined to volubility. 

Yet Browning’s poetry is not verbose. It is 
singularly condensed in the matter of language. 
He seems to have made his most arduous effort 
in this direction. After Paracelsus had been 
published and pronounced “unintelligible,” he 
was inclined to think that there might be some 
fault of too great terseness in the style. But 
a letter from Miss Caroline Fox was shown to 
him, in which that lady, (then very young,) 
took the opposite view and asked “doth he 
know that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight 
or more to the discovery of the single word 
that is the one fit for his sonnet.” Browning 
appears to have been impressed by this criti- 
cism; but he set himself to work upon it, not 
so much by way of selecting words as by way of 
compressing them. He put Sordello into a 
world where many of the parts of speech are 
lacking and all are crowded. He learned to 
pack the largest possible amount of mean- 
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ing into the smallest possible space, as a hasty 
traveller packs his portmanteau. Many small 
articles are crushed and crumpled out of shape. 
He adopted a system of elisions for the sake 
of brevity, and loved, as C. S. Calverley said, 

“to dock the smaller 'parts of speech 
As we curtail iti already curtailed cur” 

At the same time he seldom could resist the 
temptation to put in another thought, another 
simile, another illustration, although the poem 
might be already quite full. He called out, 
like the conductor of a street-car, “Move up 
in front: room for one more!” He had little 
tautology of expression, but much of conception. 
A good critic says “Browning condenses by 
the phrase, elaborates by the volume.”* 

One consequence of this system of writing is 
that a great deal of Browning’s poetry lends 
itself admirably to translation, — into English. 
The number of prose paraphrases of his poems 
is great, and so constantly increasing that it 
seems as if there must be a real demand for 
them. But Coleridge, speaking of the qual- 
ities of a true poetic style, remarked: “What- 
ever lines can be translated into other words 
of the same language without diminution of 

* Cheney, The Golden Guess, p. 143. 

240 


“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


their significance, either in sense, or in asso- 
ciation, or in any other feeling, are so far vicious 
in their diction.” 

Another very notable thing in Browning’s 
poetry is his fertility and fluency of rhyme. He 
is probably the most rapid, ingenious and un- 
wearying rhymer among the English poets. 
There is a story that once, in company with 
Tennyson, he was challenged to produce a 
rhyme for “rhinoceros,” and almost instantly 
accomplished the task with a verse in which 
the unwieldy quadruped kept time and tune 
with the phrase “he can toss Eros.”* There 
are other tours de force almost as extraordinary 
in his serious poems. Who but Browning 
would have thought of rhyming “syntax” 
with “tin-tacks,” or “spare-rib” with “Carib,” 
( Flight of Duchess) or “Fra Angelico’s”, with 
“bellicose,” or “Ghirlandajo” with “heigh- 
ho,” ( Old Pictures in Florence) or “expansive 
explosive” with “O Danaides, O Sieve!” 
{Master Ilugues) ? Rhyme, with most poets, 
acts as a restraint, a brake upon speech. But 
with Browning it is the other way. His rhymes 
are like wild, frolicsome horses, leaping over 
the fences and carrying him into the widest 
digressions. Many a couplet, many a stanza 

* Memoir of Alfred Lord Tennyson , vol. II, p. 230. 

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would not have been written but for the im- 
pulse of a daring, suggestive rhyme. 

Join to this love of somewhat reckless rhym- 
ing, his deep and powerful sense of humour, 
and you have the secret of his fondness for the 
grotesque. His poetry abounds in strange con- 
trasts, sudden changes of mood, incongruous 
comparisons, and odd presentations of well- 
known subjects. Sometimes the whole poem 
is written in this manner. The Soliloquy in 
a Spanish Cloister , Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis 9 
and Caliban upon Setebos , are poetic gargoyles. 
Sometimes he begins seriously enough, as in 
the poem on Keats, and closes with a bit of 
fantastic irony: 

“Hobbs hints blue , — straight he turtle eats: 

Nobbs prints blue , — claret crowns his cup : 

NoJces outdares StoJces in azure feats — 

Both gorge. Who fished the mur ex up? 

What porridge had John Keats?” 

Sometimes the poem opens grotesquely, like 
Christmas Eve , and rises swiftly to a wonderful 
height of pure beauty and solemnity, dropping 
back into a grotesque at the end. But all 
this play of fancy must not be confused with 
the spirit of mockery or of levity. It is often 
characteristic of the most serious and earnest 
natures; it arises in fact from the restlessness 
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THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


of mind in the contemplation of evil, or from 
the perception of life’s difficulties and per- 
plexities. Shakespeare was profoundly right 
in introducing the element of the grotesque 
into Hamlet , his most thoughtful tragedy. 
Browning is never really anything else but a 
serious thinker, passionately curious to solve 
the riddle of existence. Like his own Sordello he 

“Gave to familiar things a face grotesque. 

Only, 'pursuing through the mad burlesque, 

A grave regard 

We may sum up, then, what we have to say 
of Browning’s method and manner by recogniz- 
ing that they belong together and have a 
mutual fitness and inevitableness. We may 
wish that he had attained to more lucidity 
and harmony of expression, but we should prob- 
ably have had some difficulty in telling him pre- 
cisely how to do it, and he would have been 
likely to reply with good humour as he did to 
Tennyson, “The people must take me as 
they find me.” If he had been less ardent in 
looking for subjects for his poetry, he might 
have given more care to the form of his poems. 
If he had cut fewer blocks, he might have 
finished more statues. The immortality of 
much of his work may be discounted by its 
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want of perfect art, — the only true preservative 
of man’s handiwork. But the immortality of 
his genius is secure. He may not be ranked 
finally among the great masters of the art of 
poetry. But he certainly will endure as a mine 
for poets. They may stamp the coins more 
clearly and fashion the ornaments more 
delicately. But the gold is his. He was the 
prospector, — the first dramatic psychologist of 
modern life. The very imperfections of his 
work, in all its splendid richness and bewilder- 
ing complexity, bear witness to his favourite 
doctrine that life itself is more interesting than 
art, and more glorious, because it is not yet 
perfect. 

V 

“The Glory of the Imperfect,” — that is a 
phrase which I read in a pamphlet by that 
fine old Grecian and noble Christian phil- 
osopher, George Herbert Palmer, many years 
ago. It seems to me to express the central 
meaning of Browning’s poetry. 

He is the poet of aspiration and endeavour; 
the prophet of a divine discontent. All things 
are precious to him, not in themselves, but as 
their defects are realized, as man uses them, 
and presses through them, towards something 
244 


“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


higher and better. Hope is man’s power: and 
the things hoped for must be as yet unseen. 
Struggle is man’s life; and the purpose of life is 
not merely education, but a kind of progressive 
creation of the soul. 

“ Man 'partly is and wholly hopes to he ” 

The world presents itself to him, as the Ger- 
mans say, Im Werden. It is a world of 
potencies, working itself out. Existence is not 
the mere fact of being, but the vital process of 
becoming. The glory of man lies in his power 
to realize this process in his mind and to fling 
himself into it with all his will. If he tries to 
satisfy himself with things as they are, like 
the world-wedded soul in Easter Eve , he fails. 
If he tries to crowd the infinite into the finite, 
like Paracelsus, he fails. He must make his 
dissatisfaction his strength. He must accept 
the limitations of his life, not in the sense of 
submitting to them, but as Jacob wrestled 
with the angel, in order to win, through con- 
flict, a new power, a larger blessing. His 
ardent desires and longings and aspirations, 
yes, even his defeats and disappointments and 
failures, are the stuff out of which his immortal 
destiny is weaving itself. The one thing that 
life requires of him is to act with ardour, to go 
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forward resolutely, to “burn his way through 
the world”; and the great lesson which it 
teaches him is this: 

“ But thou shalt 'painfully attain to joy 
While hope and love and fear shall keep thee man ” 

Browning was very much needed in the Nine- 
teenth Century as the antidote, or perhaps it 
would be more just to say, as the complement 
to Carlyle. For Carlyle’s prophecy, with all 
its moral earnestness, its virility, its indomi- 
table courage, had in it a ground-tone of despair. 
It was the battle-cry of a forlorn hope. Man 
must hate shams intensely, must seek reality 
passionately, must do his duty desperately; 
but he can never tell why. The reason of 
things is inscrutable: the eternal Power that 
rules things is unknowable. Carlyle, said Maz- 
zini, “has a constant disposition to crush the 
human by comparing him with God.” But 
Browning has an unconquerable disposition 
to elevate the human by joining him to God. 
The power that animates and governs the world 
is Divine; man cannot escape from it nor over- 
come it. But the love that stirs in man’s heart 
is also Divine; and if man will follow it, it shall 
lead him to that height where he shall see that 
Power is Love. 


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“7 have faith such end shall he: 

From the first Power was — I knew . 

Life has made clear to me 

That , strive hut for closer view , 

Love were as 'plain to see. 

When see ? When there dawns a day 
If not on the homely earthy 
Then yonder y worlds away , 

Where the strange and new have birth 
And Power comes full in play.” * 

Browning’s optimism is fundamental. Orig- 
inally a matter of temperament, perhaps, as 
it is expressed in At the Mermaid , — 

“I find earth not gray , hut rosy. 

Heaven not grim hut fair of hue. 

Do I stoop ? I pluck a posy. 

Do I stand and stare ? Alls blue ” 

primarily the spontaneous tone of a healthy, 
happy nature, it became the chosen key-note 
of all his music, and he works it out through 
a hundred harmonies and discords. He is 
“sure of goodness as of life.” He does not ask 
“How came good into the world?” For that, 
after all, is the pessimistic question; it assumes 
that the ground of things is evil and the good 
is the breaking of the rule. He asks instead 
“How came evil into the world?” That is 

* Asolando, “ Reverie.” 

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the optimistic question; as long as a man puts 
it in that form he is an optimist at heart; he 
takes it for granted that good is the native 
element and evil is the intruder; there must be 
a solution of the problem whether he can 
find it or not; the rule must be superior to, and 
triumphant over, the exception; the meaning 
and purpose of evil must somehow, some time, 
be proved subordinate to good. 

That is Browning’s position: 

“ My own hope is, a sun will pierce 
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ; 

That, after Last, returns the First, 

Though a unde compass round he fetched; 

That what began best, can't end worst , 

Nor what God blessed once prove accurst ” 

The way in which he justifies this position is 
characteristic of the man. His optimism is 
far less defensive than it is militant. He 
never wavers from his intuitive conviction that 
“the world means good.” He follows this 
instinct as a soldier follows his banner, into 
whatever difficulties and conflicts it may lead 
him, and fights his way out, now with the 
weapons of philosophy, now with the bare 
sword of faith. 


248 


‘‘THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 
VI 

It might seem at first as if it were unfair to 
attempt any estimate of the philosophic and 
religious teaching of a poet like Browning, 
whose method we have already recognized as 
dramatic. Can we ascribe to the poet him- 
self the opinions which he puts into the mouths 
of his characters? Can we hold him responsible 
for the sentiments which are expressed by the 
actors on his stage? 

Certainly this objection must be admitted 
as a restraint in the interpretation of his poetry. 
We are not to take all that his characters 
say, literally and directly, as his own belief, 
any more than we are to read the speeches of 
Satan, and Eliphaz, and Bildad, and Zophar, 
in the Book of Job, as utterances of the spirit 
of inspiration. But just as that great dramatic 
Scripture, dealing with the problems of evil 
and suffering and sovereignty, does contain 
a doctrine and convey a lesson, so the poetry 
of Browning, taken as a whole, utters a distinct 
and positive prophetic message. 

In the first place, many of the poems are evi- 
dently subjective, written without disguise in 
the first person. Among these we may con- 
sider My Star; By the Fireside ; One Word More; 

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the Epilogues to Dramatis Personae and Pachiar - 
rotto and Ferishtah’s Fancies; the introduction 
and the close of The Ring and the Booh; Christ- 
mas Eve and Easter Day; the ending of the 
poem called Gold Hair , and of A Death in the 
Desert , and of Bishop Blougram’s Apology; 
Prospice and Reverie . In the second place we 
must remember Goethe’s dictum: “Every au- 
thor in some degree, pourtrays himself in his 
works, even be it against his will.” Even when 
Browning is writing dramatically, he cannot 
conceal his sympathy. The masks are thin. 
His eyes shine through. “His own personal- 
ity,” says Mr. Stedman, “is manifest in the 
speech and movement of almost every char- 
acter of each piece. His spirit is infused as if 
by metempsychosis, within them all, and forces 
each to assume a strange Pentecostal tone, 
which we discover to be that of the poet him- 
self.” Thus it is not impossible, nor even diffi- 
cult, to reach a fair estimate of his ethical and 
religious teaching and discover its principal ele- 
ments. 

1. First among these I would put a great 
confidence in God. Browning is the most theo- 
logical of modern poets. The epithet which 
was applied to Spinoza might well be trans- 
ferred to him. He is a “God-intoxicated” 
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“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


man. But in a very different sense, for where- 
as the philosopher felt God as an idea, the poet 
feels Him intensely as a person. The song 
which he puts into the lips of the unconscious 
heroine in Pippa Passes , — 

“ God's in his heaven 
All's right with the world , ” 

is the recurrent theme of his poetry. He cries 
with Paracelsus, 

“ God thou art Love , 1 build my faith on that ” 

Even when his music is broken and interrupted 
by discords, when it seems to dissolve and fade 
away as all human work, in its outward form, 
dissolves and fades, he turns, as Abt Vogler 
turns from his silent organ, to God; 

“ Therefore to whom turn I but to thee y the ineffable 
Name? 

Builder and maker , thou , of houses not made with 
hands ! 

What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the 
same? 

Doubt that thy power can Jill the heart that thy power 
expands?" 

In Rabbi Ben Ezra he takes up the ancient fig- 
ure of the potter and the clay and uses it to 
express his boundless trust in God. 

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The characteristic mark of Browning’s view 
of God is that it is always taken from the side 
of humanity. The Perfect Glory is the cor- 
relative of the glory of the imperfect. The 
Divine Love is the answer to the human long- 
ing. God is, because man needs Him. From 
this point of view it almost seems, as a brilliant 
essayist has said, as if “In Browning, God is 
adjective to man.” * 

But it may be said in answer, that, at least 
for man, this is the only point of view that is 
accessible. We can never leave our own needs 
behind us, however high we may try to climb. 
Certainly if we succeed in forgetting them for a 
moment, in that very moment we have passed 
out of the region of poetry, which is the impas- 
sioned interpretation of man’s heart. 

2. The second element of power in Brown- 
ing’s poetry is that he sees in the personal 
Christ the very revelation of God that man’s 
heart most needs and welcomes. Nowhere else 
in all the range of modern poetry has this 
vision been expressed with such spiritual ardour, 
with such poignant joy. We must turn back 
to the pages of Isaiah to find anything to 
equal the Messianic rapture of the minstrel in 
Saul. 


*J. J. Chapman, Emerson, and Other Essays. 

252 


“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


“He who did most shall bear most: the strongest shall stand 
the most weak. 

*Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for l my flesh 
that I seek 

In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. 0 Saul, it shall 
be , 

A Face like my face that receives thee; a man like to 
me. 

Thou shalt love and be loved by y forever : a Hand like 
this hand 

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! see the Christ 
stand /” 

We must look into the Christ-filled letters of St. 
Paul to find the attractions of the Crucified One 
uttered as powerfully as they are in the Epistle of 
Karshish. 

“ The very God ! think , Abib; dost thou think? 

So y the All-great , were the All-Loving too — 

So, through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying , ‘0 heart I made y a heart beats here! 

Face , my hands fashioned, see it in myself! 

Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of mine. 

But love I gave thee, with myself to love. 

And thou must love me who have died for thee!’” 

It is idle to assert that these are only dramat- 
ic presentations of the Christian faith. No 
poet could have imagined such utterances with- 
out feeling their significance; and the piercing 
splendour of their expression discloses his sym- 
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pathy. He reveals it yet more unmistakably 
in Christmas Eve (strophe XVII) and in Easter 
Day , (strophe XXX.) In the Epilogue to 
Dramatis Personae it flashes out clearly. The 
second speaker, as Renan, has bewailed the 
vanishing of the face of Christ from the sorrow- 
ful vision of the race. The third speaker, the 
poet himself, answers: 

“ That one Face, far from vanish , rather grows , 

Or decomposes hut to recompose 

Become my universe that feels and knows 1” 

“That face,” said Browning to a friend, 4 4 that 
face is the face of Christ: that is how I feel 
Him.” 

Surely this is the religious message that the 
world most needs to-day. More and more 
everything in Christianity hangs upon the 
truth of the Incarnation. The alternative de- 
clares itself. Either no God whom we can 
know and love at all, or God personally mani- 
fest in Christ! 

3. The third religious element in Browning’s 
poetry is his faith that this life is a probation, a 
discipline for the future. He says, again and 
again, 

“ I count life just a stuff 
To try the souVs strength on , educe the man." 

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“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


The glory of the imperfect lies in the power of 
progress, “man’s distinctive mark.” And prog- 
ress comes by conflict; conflict with false- 
hood and ignorance, — 

“Living here means nescience simply; ’tis next life that 
helps to learn ” 

and conflict with evil, — 

“ Why comes temptation hut for man to meet , 

And master and make crouch beneath his feet , 

And so he pedestalled in triumph?” 

The poet is always calling us to be glad we are 
engaged in such a noble strife. 

“Rejoice we are allied 
To that which doth provide 
And riot partake , effect and not receive ! 

A spark disturbs our clod; 

Nearer we hold of God 

Who gives, than of his tribes that take , I must believe . 

Then welcome each rebuff 

That turns earth's smoothness rough , 

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 

Be our joys three-parts pain ! 

Strive and hold cheap the strain; 

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe I” 

Now this is fine doctrine, lofty, strenuous, 
stimulating. It appeals to the will, which is 
man’s central power. It proclaims the truth 
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that virtue must be active in its essence though 
it may also be passive in its education, positive 
in its spirit and negative only by contrast. 

But it is in the working out of this doctrine 
into an ethical system that Browning enters 
upon dangerous ground, and arrives at results 
which seem to obscure the clearness, and to 
threaten the stability of the moral order, by 
which alone, if the world’s greatest teachers 
have been right, the ultimate good of humanity 
can be attained. Here, it seems to me, his 
teaching, especially in its latter utterances, is 
often confused, turbulent, misleading. His light 
is mixed with darkness. He seems almost to say 
that it matters little which way we go, provided 
only we go. 

He overlooks the deep truth that there is an 
activity of the soul in self-restraint as well as 
in self-assertion. It takes as much courage to 
dare not to do evil as it does to dare to do good. 
The hero is sometimes the man who stands still. 
Virtue is noblest when it is joined to virility. 
But virility alone is not virtue nor does it 
always lead to moral victory. Sometimes it 
leads straight towards moral paralysis, death, 
extinction. Browning fails to see this, because 
his method is dramatic and because he drama- 
tizes through himself. He puts himself into 
256 


“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


this or the other character, and works himself 
out through it, preserving still in himself, 
though all unconsciously, the soul of something 
good. Thus he does not touch that peculiar 
deadening of spiritual power which is one result 
of the unrestrained following of impulse and 
passion. It is this defect in his vision of life* 
that leads to the dubious and interrogatory 
moral of such a poem as The Statue and the 
Bust . 

Browning values the individual so much that 
he lays all his emphasis upon the development 
of stronger passions and aspirations, the unfold- 
ing of a more vivid and intense personality, 
and has comparatively little stress to lay upon 
the larger thought of the progress of mankind 
in harmony and order. Indeed he poetizes so 
vigorously against the conventional judgments 
of society that he often seems to set himself 
against the moral sentiments on which those 
conventional judgments, however warped, ul- 
timately rest. “Over and over again in Brown- 
ing’s poetry,” says a penetrating critic, “we 
meet with this insistence on the value of mo- 
ments of high excitement, of intense living, of 
full experience of pleasure, even though such 
moments be of the essence of evil and fruitful 
in all dark consequences.” 

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Take for example his treatment of love. He 
is right in saying “Love is best.” But is he 
right in admitting, even by inference, that love 
has a right to take its own way of realizing it- 
self? Can love be at its best unless it is obe- 
dient to law? Does it not make its truest music 
when it keeps its place in the harmony of 
purity and peace and good living? Surely the 
wild and reckless view of love as its own law 
which seems to glimmer through the uncon- 
sumed smoke of Browning’s later poems, such 
as Fifine at the Fair , The Inn Album , and Red 
Cotton Nightcap Country , needs correction by a 
true flash of insight like that which we find in 
two lines of One Word More: 

“Dante, who loved well because he hated. 

Hated wickedness that hinders loving/ * 

Browning was at times misled by a perilous phi- 
losophy into a position where the vital dis- 
tinction between good and evil dissolved away 
in a cloud of unreality. In Ferishtah’s Fancies 
and Parleyings with Certain People of Impor- 
tance, any one who has the patience to read 
them will find himself in a nebulous moral 
world. The supposed necessity of showing 
that evil is always a means to good tempts to 
the assertion that it has no other reality. Per- 
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“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT” 


haps it is altogether an illusion, needed to sting 
us into conflict, but really non-existent. Per- 
haps it is only the shadow cast by the good, — 
or “the silence implying sound.” Perhaps it 
is good in disguise, not yet developed from the 
crawling worm into the creature with wings. 
After this fashion the whimsical dervish Ferish- 
tah strews his beans upon the table. 

“ This heart was white , this — hlack 9 
Set by itself , — but see if good and bad 
Each following other in companionship. 

Black have not grown less black and white less white 9 
Till blackish seems but dun , and whitish , — gray , 

And the whole line turns — well, or black to thee 
Or white alike to me — no matter which.” 

Certainly if this were the essence of Browning’s 
poetry the best safeguard against its falsehood 
would be its own weakness. Such a message, 
if this were all, could never attract many 
hearers, nor inspire those whom it attracted. 
Effort, struggle, noble conflict would be impos- 
sible in a world where there were no moral cer- 
tainties or realities, but all men felt that they 
were playing at a stupid game like the Caucus 
race in Alice in Wonderland, where everything 
went round in a circle and every runner re- 
ceived a prize. 

But in fact these elements of weakness in 
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Browning’s work, as it seems to me, do not be- 
long to his true poetry. They are expressed, 
generally, in his most obfuscated style, and at 
a prohibitory length. They are embodied in 
poems which no one is likely to read for fun, 
and few are capable of learning by heart. 

But when we go back to his best work we 
find another spirit, we hear another message. 
Clear, resonant, trumpet-like his voice calls 
to us proclaiming the glorious possibilities of 
this imperfect life. Only do not despair; only 
do not sink down into conventionality, indiffer- 
ence, mockery, cynicism; only rise and hope 
and go forward out of the house of bondage into 
the land of liberty. True, the prophecy is not 
complete. But it is inspiring. He does not 
teach us how to live. But he does tell us to 
live, — with courage, with love to man, with 
trust in God, — and he bids us find life glorious, 
because it is still imperfect and therefore full 
of promise. 


260 


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QUIET STREAMS 



A QUAINT COMRADE BY QUIET 
STREAMS 

TN April, 1653, Oliver Cromwell, after much 
bloodshed and amid great confusion, vio- 
lently dissolved the “Rump Parliament.” In 
May of the same year, Izaak Walton published 
The Compleat Angler , or the Contemplative Man's 
Recreation . ’Twas a strange contrast between 
the tranquil book and the tempestuous time. 
But that the contrast was not displeasing may 
be inferred from the fact that five editions were 
issued during the author’s life, which ended in 
1683, at the house of his son-in-law in the 
cathedral close at Winchester, Walton being 
then in his ninety-first year and at peace with 
God and man. 

Doubtless one of the reasons why those early 
editions, especially the first, the second, and 
the fifth, (in which Walton’s friend Charles Cot- 
ton added his “Instructions How to Angle for 
a Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream,”) are 
now become so rare and costly, is because they 
were carried about by honest anglers of the 
17th Century in their coat-pockets or in their 
263 


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wallets, a practice whereby the body of a book 
is soon worn out, though its soul be immortal. 

That this last is true of Walton’s Angler 
seems proven by its continual reappearance. 
The Hundredth Edition (called after the rivers 
Lea and Dove, which Walton loved) was 
brought out in 1888, by the genial fisherman 
and bibliophile, R. B. Marston of the London 
Fishing Gazette. Among the other English edi- 
tions I like John Major’s second (1824); and 
Sir John Hawkins’, reissued by Bagster (1808); 
and Pickering’s richly illustrated two volumes 
edited by Sir Harris Nicolas (1836). There is 
a 32mo reprint by the same publisher, (and a 
“ diamond” from the Oxford University Press,) 
small enough to go comfortably in a vest-pocket 
with your watch or your pipe. I must speak 
also of the admirable introductions to the 
Angler written in these latter years by James 
Russell Lowell, Andrew Lang, and Richard Le 
Gallienne; and of the great American edition 
made by the Reverend Doctor George W. 
Bethune in 1847, a work in which the learning, 
wit, and sympathy of the editor illuminate the 
pages. This edition is already hard to find, 
but no collector of angling books would will- 
ingly go without it. 

The gentle reader has a wide choice, then, of 
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A QUAINT COMRADE 

the form in which he will take his Walton, — 
something rare and richly adorned for the 
library, or something small and plain for the 
pocket or the creel. But in what shape soever 
he may choose to read the book, if he be not 
“a severe, sour-complexioned man” he will find 
it good company. There is a most propitiat- 
ing paragraph in the “Address” at the begin- 
ning of the first edition. Explaining why he 
has introduced “some innocent harmless mirth” 
into his work, Walton writes: 

“I am the willinger to justify this innocent 
mirth because the whole discourse is a kind of 
picture of my own disposition, at least of my 
disposition in such days and times as I allow 
myself, when honest Nat. and R.R. and I go a- 
fishing together.” 

This indeed is one of fhe great attractions of 
the book, that it so naturally and simply shows 
the author. I know of no other in which this 
quality of self -revelation without pretense or 
apology is as modest and engaging, — unless it 
be the Essays of Charles Lamb, or those of M. 
de Montaigne. We feel well acquainted with 
Walton when we have read the Angler , and per- 
haps have added to our reading his only other 
volume, — a series of brief Lives of certain excel- 
lent and beloved men of his time, wherein he 
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not only portrays their characters but further 
discloses his own. They were men of note in 
their day: Sir Henry Wotton, ambassador to 
Venice; Doctor John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s; 
Richard Hooker, famous theologian; George 
Herbert, sacred poet; Bishop Sanderson, emi- 
nent churchman. With most of these, and with 
other men of like standing, Walton was in 
friendship. The company he kept indicates 
his quality. Whatever his occupation or his 
means, he was certainly a gentleman and a 
scholar, as well as a good judge of fishing. 

Of the actual events of his life, despite dili- 
gent research, little is known, and all to his 
credit. Perhaps there were no events of public 
importance or interest. He came as near as 
possible to the fortunate estate of the nation 
which has a good repute but no history. 

He was born in the town of Stafford, August 
9th, 1593. Of his schooling he speaks with be- 
coming modesty; and it must have been brief, 
for at the age of sixteen or seventeen he was an 
apprentice in London. Whether he was a linen- 
draper or an ironmonger is a matter of dispute. 
Perhaps he was first one and then the other. 
His first shop, in the Royal Burse, Cornhill, 
was about seven and a half feet long by five 
wide. But he must have done a good business 
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A QUAINT COMRADE 

in those narrow quarters; for in 1624 he had a 
better place on Fleet Street, and from 1628 to 
1644 he was a resident of the parish of St. Dun- 
stan’s, having a comfortable dwelling (and 
probably his shop) in Chancery Lane, “ about 
the seventh house on the left hand side.” He 
served twice on the grand jury, and was elected 
a vestryman of St. Dunstan’s twice. 

It was during his residence here that he lost 
his first wife, Rachel Floud, and the seven chil- 
dren whom she had borne to him. In 1644, 
finding the city “ dangerous for honest men” on 
account of the civil strife and disorder, he re- 
tired from London, and probably from busi- 
ness, and lived in the country, “sometimes at 
Stafford,” (according to Anthony Wood, the 
antiquary,) “but mostly in the families of the 
eminent clergymen of England, of whom he 
was much beloved.” This life gave him large 
opportunity for his favourite avocation of fish- 
ing, and widened the circle of his friendships, 
for wherever he came as a guest he was cher- 
ished as a friend. I make no doubt that the 
love of angling, to which innocent recreation 
he was attached by a temperate and enduring 
passion, was either the occasion or the promoter 
of many of these intimacies. For it has often 
been observed that this sport inclines those 
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that practise it to friendliness; and there are 
no closer or more lasting companionships than 
such as are formed beside flowing streams by 
men who study to be quiet and go a-fishing. 

After his second marriage, about 1646, to 
Anne Ken, half-sister of Bishop Thomas Ken, 
(author of the well-known hymns, “Awake, my 
soul, and with the sun,” and “All praise to 
Thee, my God, this night,”) Walton went to 
live for some years at Clerkenwell. While he 
was there, the book for which he had been long 
preparing, The Compleat Angler , was published, 
and gave him his sure place in English litera- 
ture and in the heart of an innumerable com- 
pany of readers. 

Never was there a better illustration of “fish- 
erman’s luck” than the success of Walton’s 
book. He set out to make a little “discourse of 
fish and fishing,” a “pleasant curiositie” he 
calls it, full of useful information concerning 
the history and practice of the gentle art, and, 
as the author modestly claims on his title-page, 
“not unworthy the perusal of most anglers.” 
Instead of this he produced an imperishable 
classic, which has been read with delight by 
thousands who have never wet a line. It was 
as if a man went forth to angle for smelts and 
caught a lordly salmon. 

As a manual of practical instruction the book 
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A QUAINT COMRADE 

is long since out of date. The kind of rod 
which Walton describes is too cumbrous for the 
modern angler, who catches his trout with a 
split bamboo weighing no more than four or 
five ounces, and a thin water-proofed line of 
silk beside which Father Izaak’s favourite 
line twisted of seven horse-hairs would look like 
a bed-cord. Most of his recipes for captivating 
baits and lures, and his hints about “oyl,” or 
“camphire” with which they may be made in- 
fallibly attractive to reluctant fish, are now 
more curious than valuable. They seem like 
ancient superstitions, — although this very sum- 
mer I have had recommended to me a secret 
magic ointment one drop of which upon a 
salmon-fly would (supposedly) render it irresis- 
tible. (Yes, reader, I did try it; but its actual 
effect, owing to various incalculable circum- 
stances, could not be verified. The salmon 
took the anointed fly sometimes, but at other 
times they took the unanointed, and so I could 
not make affidavit that it was the oil, that 
allured them. It may have been some tickling 
in the brain, some dim memory of the time 
when they were little parr, living in fresh water 
for their first eighteen months and feeding 
mainly on floating insects, that made them 
wish to rise again.) 

But to return to my subject. The angler of 
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to-day who wishes to understand the technics 
of modern fishing-gear will go to such books as 
H. B. Wells’ Fly Rods and Fly Tackle, or to Dr. 
George Holden’s The Idyl of the Split Bamboo . 
This very year two volumes have been pub- 
lished, each of which in its way goes far beyond 
Walton: Mr. William Radcliffe’s Fishing from 
the Earliest Times, which will undoubtedly take 
its place as the standard history of the ancient 
craft of fish-catching; and Mr. Edward R. Hew- 
itt’s Secrets of the Salmon, a brilliant and sug- 
gestive piece of work, full of acute scientific ob- 
servation and successful experiment. These 
belong to what De Quincey called “the litera- 
ture of knowledge.” But the Angler belongs 
to “the literature of power,” — that which has 
a quickening and inspiring influence upon the 
spirit, — and here it is unsurpassed, I may even 
say unrivalled, by any book ever written about 
any sport. Charles Lamb wrote to Coleridge 
commending it to his perusal: “It might 
sweeten a man’s temper at any time to read 
The Compleat Angler .” 

The unfailing charm of the book lives in its 
delicately clear descriptions of the country and 
of rural life; in its quaint pastoral scenes, like 
the interview with the milkmaid and her 
mother, and the convocation of gypsies under 
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A QUAINT COMRADE 

the hedge; and in its sincerely happy incite- 
ments to patience, cheerfulness, a contented 
spirit, and a tranquil mind. 

In its first form the book opened with a 
dialogue between Piscator and Viator; but 
later this was revised to a three-sided conversa- 
tion in which Venator, a hunter, and Auceps, 
a falconer, take the place of Viator and try 
valiantly to uphold the merits of their respec- 
tive sports as superior to angling. Of course 
Piscator easily gets the best of them, (authors 
always have this power to reserve victory for 
their favourites,) and Auceps goes off stage, 
vanquished, while Venator remains as a convert 
and willing disciple, to follow his “Master” by 
quiet streams and drink in his pleasant and 
profitable discourse. As a dialogue it is not 
very convincing, it lacks salt and pepper; 
Venator is too easy a convert; he makes two 
or three rather neat repartees, but in general 
he seems to have no mind of his own. But as a 
monologue it is very agreeable, being written 
in a sincere, colloquial, unaffected yet not un- 
dignified manner, with a plenty of digressions. 
And these, like the by-paths on a journey, are 
the pleasantest parts of all. Piscator’s talk ap- 
pears easy, unconstrained, rambling, yet al- 
ways sure-footed, like the walk of one who has 
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wandered by the little rivers so long that he 
can move forward safely without watching 
every step, finding his footing by a kind of in- 
stinct while his eyes follow the water and the 
rising fish. 

But we must not imagine that such a style as 
this, fluent as it seems and easy to read as it is 
for any one with an ear for music, either comes 
by nature or is attained without effort. Wal- 
ton speaks somewhere of his *' 6 artless pencil”; 
but this is true only in the sense that he makes 
us forget the processes of his art in the sim- 
plicity of its results. He was in fact very nice 
in his selection and ordering of words. He 
wrote and rewrote his simplest sentences and 
revised his work in each of the five earlier edi- 
tions, except possibly the fourth. 

Take, for example, the bit which I have al- 
ready quoted from the “address to the reader” 
in the first edition, and compare it with the cor- 
responding passage in the fifth edition: 

“I am the willinger to justify the pleasant part 
of it, because, though it is known I can be serious 
at reasonable times, yet the whole discourse is, 
or rather was, a picture of my own disposition, 
especially in such days and times as I have laid 
aside business, and gone a-fishing with honest 
Nat. and R. Roe; but they are gone , and with 
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them most of my 'pleasant hours , even as a shadow 
that passeth away and returns not." 

All the phrases in italics are either altered or 
added. 

He cites Montaigne’s opinion of cats, — a 
familiar judgment expressed with lightness, — 
and in the first edition winds up his quotation 
with the sentence, “To this purpose speaks 
Montaigne concerning cats.” In the fifth edi- 
tion this is humourously improved to, “Thus 
freely speaks Mountaigne concerning cats,” — 
as if it were something noteworthy to take a 
liberty with this petted animal. 

The beautiful description of the song of the 
nightingale, and of the lark, and the fine pas- 
sage beginning, “ Every misery that I miss is a new 
mercy,” are jewels that Walton added in revision. 

In the first edition he gravely tells how the 
salmon “will force themselves over the tops of 
weirs and hedges or stops in the water, by taking 
their tails into their mouths and leaping over 
those places , even to a height beyond common 
belief.” But upon reflection this fish-story 
seems to him dubious; and so in the later edi- 
tion you find the mouth-and-tail legend in a 
poetical quotation, to which Walton cautiously 
adds, “ This Michael Drayton tells you of this 
leap or summer-salt of the salmon.” 

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It would be easy to continue these illustra- 
tions of Walton’s care in revising his work 
through successive editions; indeed a long 
article, or even a little book might be made 
upon this subject, and if I had the time I 
should like to do it. 

Another theme would well repay study, and 
that is the influence of the King James Version 
of the Bible upon his style and thought. That 
wonderful example of pure, strong, and stately 
English prose, was first printed and published 
when Walton was eighteen years old, about 
the time he came to London as an apprentice. 
Yet to such good purpose did he read and 
study it that his two books, the Angler and 
the Lives , are full of apt quotations from it, and 
almost every page shows the exemplary effect 
of its admirable diction. Indeed it has often 
seemed to me that his fine description of the 
style of the Prophet Amos, (in the first chapter 
of the Angler ,) reveals something of the manner 
in which Walton himself desired to write; and 
in this desire he was not altogether unsuccess- 
ful. 

How clearly the man shines through his 
book! An honest, kindly man, not ashamed 
of his trade, nor of his amusements, nor of 
his inmost faith. A man contented with his 
274 


A QUAINT COMRADE 

modest place in the world, and never doubting 
that it was a good world or that God made it. 
A firm man, not without his settled convictions 
and strong aversions, yet “content that every 
reader should enjoy his own opinion.” A lib- 
eral-mannered man, enjoying the music of 
birds and of merry songs and glees, grateful for 
good food, and “barly-wine, the good liquor 
that our honest Fore-fathers did use to drink 
of,” and a fragrant pipe afterwards; sitting 
down to meat not only with “the eminent 
clergymen of England,” but also, (as his Master 
did,) with publicans and sinners; and counting 
among his friends such dignitaries as Dr, John 
Hales, Bishop King, and Sir Henry Wotton, 
and such lively and vagarious persons as Ben 
Jonson, Carey, and Charles Cotton. A loyal, 
steadfast man, not given to change, anxiety of 
mind, or vain complaining, but holding to the 
day’s duty and the day’s reward of joy as God 
sent them to him, and bearing the day’s grief 
with fortitude. Thus he worked and read and 
angled quietly through the stormy years of the 
Civil War and the Commonwealth, wishing 
that men would beat their swords into fish- 
hooks, and cast their leaden bullets into sinkers, 
and study peace and the Divine will. 


27 5 





































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A STURDY BELIEVER 






A STURDY BELIEVER 


TXTHEN James Boswell, Esq., wrote The Life 
* * of Samuel Johnson , LL.D ., he not only 
achieved his purpose of giving the world “a rich 
intellectual treasure,” but also succeeded in 
making himself a subject of permanent literary 
interest. 

Among the good things which the year 1922 
has brought to us I count the Boswell redivivus 
from the industrious and skilful hand of Pro- 
fessor Chauncey Brewster Tinker of Yale. He 
calls his excellent book, which is largely en- 
riched with new material in the way of hitherto 
unpublished letters. Young Boswell. This does 
not mean that he deals only with the early 
years, amatory episodes, and first literary ven- 
tures of Johnson’s inimitable biographer, but 
that he sees in the man a certain persistent 
youngness which accounts for the exuberance 
of his faults and follies as well as for the en- 
thusiasm of his hero-worship. 

Mr. Tinker does not attempt to camouflage 
the incorrigible absurdities of Boswell’s dis- 
position, nor the excesses of his conduct, but 
finds an explanation if not an excuse for them 
279 


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in the fact that he had a juvenile tempera- 
ment which inclined him all through life to 
self-esteem and self-indulgence, and kept him 
“very much a boy” until he died of it. Whether 
this is quite consistent with his being “in fullest 
truth a genius,” as Mr. Tinker claims, may be 
doubted; for genius in the high sense is some- 
thing that ripens if time be given it. But 
what is certain beyond a question is that this 
vain and vagarious little Scotch laird had in 
him a gift of observation, a talent of narration, 
and above all a power of generous admiration, 
which enabled him to become, by dint of hard 
work, what Macaulay entitled him, “the first 
of biographers.” 

Ever since it appeared in 1791, Boswell’s 
Life of Johnson has been a most companionable 
book. Reprinted again and again, it finds a 
perennial welcome. To see it in a new edition 
is no more remarkable nowadays than it once 
was to see Dr. Oliver Goldsmith in a new and 
vivid waistcoat. For my own part I prefer it 
handsomely drest, with large type, liberal mar- 
gins, and a-plenty of illustrations. For it is 
not a book in which economy of bulk is needful; 
it is less suitable for company on a journey or a 
fishing-trip, than for a meditative hour in the 
library after dinner, or a pleasant wakeful hour 
280 


A STURDY BELIEVER 

in bed, when the reading-lamp glows clear and 
steady, and all the rest of the family are asleep 
or similarly engaged in recumbent reading. 

There are some books with which we can 
never become intimate. However long we may 
know them they keep us on the cold threshold 
of acquaintance. Others boisterously grasp our 
hand and drag us in, only to bore us and make 
us regret the day of our introduction. But if 
there ever was a book which invited genially to 
friendship and delight it is this of Boswell’s. 
The man who does not know it is ignorant of 
some of the best cheer that can enliven a soli- 
tary fireside. The man who does not enjoy it 
is insensible alike to the attractions of a noble 
character vividly depicted, and to the amuse- 
ment afforded by the sight of a great genius in 
company with an adoring follower capable, at 
times, of acting like an engaging ass. 

Yet after all, I have always had my doubts 
about the supposed “asininity” of Boswell. As 
his Great Friend said, “A man who talks non- 
sense so well must know that he is talking non- 
sense.” It is only fair to accept his own ex- 
planation and allow that when he said or did 
ridiculous things it was, partly at least, in order 
to draw out his Tremendous Companion. Thus 
we may think with pleasure of Boswell taking 
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a rise out of Johnson. But we do not need to 
imagine Johnson taking a rise out of Boswell; 
it was not necessary; he rose of his own ac- 
cord. He made a candid record of these divert- 
ing incidents because, though self-complacent, 
he was not touchy, and he had sense enough 
to see that the sure way to be entirely enter- 
taining is to be quite frank. 

Boswell threw a stone at one bird and 
brought down two. His triumphant effort to 
write the life of his Immense Hero just as it 
was, with all its surroundings, appurtenances, 
and eccentricities, has won for himself a singu- 
lar honour: his proper name has become a com- 
mon noun. It is hardly necessary to use a 
capital letter when we allude to a boswell. His 
pious boast that he had “ Johnsonized the 
land,” is no more correct than it would be to 
say, (and if he were alive he would certainly 
say it,) that he had boswellized biography. 

The success of the book appears the more 
remarkable when we remember that of the 
seventy-five years of Samuel Johnson’s life not 
more than two years and two months were 
passed in the society of James Boswell. Yet 
one would almost think that they had been 
rocked in the same cradle, or, (if this figure of 
speech seem irreverent,) that the Laird of 


A STURDY BELIEVER 

Auchinleck had slept in a little trundle-bed be- 
side the couch of the Mighty Lexicographer. 
I do not mean by this that the record is trivial 
and cubicular, but simply that Boswell has put 
into his book as much of Johnson as it will hold. 

Let no one imagine, however, that a like suc- 
cess can be secured by following the same 
recipe with any chance subject. The exact 
portraiture of an insignificant person confers 
information where there is no curiosity, and 
becomes tedious in proportion as it is precise.* 
The first thing needful is to catch a giant for 
your hero; and in this little world it is seldom 
that one like Johnson comes to the net. 

What a man he was, — this “old straggler,” 
as he called himself, — how uncouth and noble 
and genuine and profound, — “a labouring, 
working mind; an indolent, reposing body”! 
What a heart of fortitude in the bosom of his 
melancholy, what a kernel of human kindness 
within the shell of his rough manner! He was 
proud but not vain, sometimes rude but never 
cruel. His prejudices were insular, but his 
intellect was continental. There was enough 
of contradiction in his character to give it 
variety, and enough of sturdy faith to give it 

*1 am haunted by the notion that Johnson himself said this, 
but I cannot find the passage for quotation. 

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unity. It was not easy for him to be good, but 
it was impossible for him to be false; and he 
fought the battle of life through along his 
chosen line even to the last skirmish of mor- 
tality. 

I suppose we Americans might harbour a 
grudge against him on the score of his opinion 
of our forefathers. It is on record that he said 
of them, during their little controversy with 
King George III, that they were “a race of con- 
victs.” (How exciting it would have been to 
hear him say a thing like that to the face of 
George Washington or Benjamin Franklin! He 
was quite capable of it.) But we can afford to 
laugh at such an obiter dictum now. And upon 
my honesty it offends me less at the present 
time than Lionel Lispingly Nutt’s condescend- 
ing advice on poetry and politics, or Stutter- 
worth Bummell’s patronizing half-praise. Let 
a man smite us fairly on one cheek, and we can 
manage to turn the other, — out of his reach. 
But if he deals superciliously with us as 44 poor 
relations,” we can hardly help looking for a 
convenient and not too dangerous flight of 
stairs for his speedy descent. 

Johnson may be rightly claimed as a Tory- 
Democrat on the strength of his serious saying 
that “the interest of millions must ever prevail 
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A STURDY BELIEVER 

over that of thousands,” and the temper of his 
pungent letter to Lord Chesterfield. And when 
we consider also his side remark in defense of 
card-playing on the ground that it “generates 
kindness and consolidates society,” we may 
differ from him in our estimate of the game, but 
we cannot deny that in small things as well as 
in great he spoke as a liberal friend of human- 
ity. 

His literary taste was not infallible; in some 
instances, (for example his extreme laudation 
of Sir John Denham’s poem Cooper's Hill , and 
his adverse criticism of Milton’s verse,) it was 
very bad. In general you may say that it was 
based upon theories and rules which are not 
really of universal application, though he con- 
ceived them to be so. But his style was much 
more the product of his own personality and 
genius. Ponderous it often was, but seldom 
clumsy. He had the art of saying what he 
meant in a deliberate, clear, forceful way. 
Words arrayed themselves at his command and 
moved forward in serried phalanx. He had 
the praiseworthy habit of completing his sen- 
tences and building his paragraphs firmly. 
It will not do us any good to belittle his merit 
as a writer, particularly in this age of slipper- 
shod and dressing-gowned English. 

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His diction was much more varied than 
people usually suppose. He could suit his man- 
ner to almost any kind of subject, except pos- 
sibly the very lightest. He had a keen sense of 
the shading of synonyms and rarely picked the 
wrong word. Of antithesis and the balanced 
sentence he was over-fond; and this device, 
intended originally to give a sharpened empha- 
sis, being used too often, lends an air of monot- 
ony to his writing. Yet it has its merits too, 
as may be seen in these extracts from the fif- 
tieth number of The Rambler , — extracts which, 
by the way, have some relation to a controversy 
still raging: 

“ Every old man complains of the growing 
depravity of the world, of the petulance and 
insolence of the rising generation. He re- 
counts the decency and regularity of former 
times, and celebrates the discipline and sobriety 
of the age in which his youth was passed; a 
happy age, which is now no more to be ex- 
pected, since confusion has broken in upon the 
world and thrown down all the boundaries of 
civility and reverence. ... It may, therefore, 
very reasonably be suspected that the old 
draw upon themselves the greatest part of those 
insults which they so much lament, and that 
age is rarely despised but when it is contempt- 
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A STURDY BELIEVER 

ible. . . . He that would pass the latter part 
of his life with honour and decency, must, when 
he is young, consider that he shall one day be 
old; and remember, when he is old, that he 
has once been young. In youth, he must lay 
up knowledge for his support, when his powers 
of action shall forsake him; and in age forbear 
to animadvert with rigour on faults which ex- 
perience only can correct.” 

In meaning this is very much the same as Sir 
James Barrie’s recent admirable discourse on 
“Courage” at the University of St. Andrew’s; 
but in manner there is quite a difference. 

It is commonly supposed that Dr. Johnson 
did a great deal to overload and oppress the 
English language by introducing new and awk- 
ward words of monstrous length. His oppor- 
tunities in that way were large, but he always 
claimed that he had used them with modera- 
tion and had not coined above four or five 
words. When we note that “peregrinity ” was 
one of them, we are grateful that he refrained 
so much; but when we remember that “club- 
bable” was another, we are glad that he did 
not refrain altogether. For there is no quality 
more easy to recognize and difficult to define 
than that which makes a man acceptable in a 
club; and of this Dr. Johnson has given us a 
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fine example in his life and an appropriate name 
in his word. 

I think one reason why he got on so well 
with people who differed from him, and why 
most of the sensible ones so readily put up with 
his downright and often brusque way of ex- 
pressing his sentiments, was because they came 
so evidently from his sincere and unshakeable 
conviction that certain things are true, that 
they can not be changed, and that they should 
not be forgotten. Not only in politics, but also 
and more significantly in religion, Samuel John- 
son stands out as a sturdy believer. 

This seems the more noteworthy when we 
consider the conditions of his life. There is 
hardly one among the great men of history who 
can be called so distinctively “a man of let- 
ters,” undoubtedly none who has won as high 
a position and as large a contemporary influ- 
ence by sheer strength of pen. Now the liter- 
ary life is not generally considered to be espe- 
cially favourable to the cultivation of religion; 
and Johnson’s peculiar circumstances were not 
of a kind to make it more favourable in his case 
than usual. He was poor and neglected, 
struggling during a great part of his career 
against the heaviest odds. His natural dis- 
position was by no means such as to predis- 
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A STURDY BELIEVER 


pose him to faith. He was afflicted from child- 
hood with a hypochondriac and irritable hu- 
mour; a high, domineering spirit, housed in an 
unwieldy and disordered body; plagued by in- 
ordinate physical appetites; inclined naturally 
to rely with over-confidence upon the strength 
and accuracy of his reasoning powers; driven 
by his impetuous temper into violent assertion 
and controversy; deeply depressed by his long 
years of obscurity and highly elated by his 
final success, — he was certainly not one whom 
we would select as likely to be a remarkably 
religious man. Carlyle had less to embitter 
him. Goethe had no more to excuse self- 
idolatry. And yet, beyond a doubt, Johnson 
was a sincere, humble, and, in the main, a con- 
sistent Christian. 

Of course, we cannot help seeing that his 
peculiarities and faults affected his religion. 
He was intolerant in his expression of theo- 
logical views to a degree which seems almost 
ludicrous. We may, perhaps, keep a straight 
face and a respectful attitude when we see him 
turning his back on the Abbe Raynal, and re- 
fusing to “ shake hands with an infidel.” But 
when he exclaims in regard to a young lady who 
had left the Church of England to become a 
Quaker, “I hate the wench and shall ever hate 
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her; I hate all impudence of a chit; apostasy I 
nauseate”; and when he answers the gently 
expressed hope of a friend that he and the girl 
would meet, after all, in a blessed eternity, by 
saying, “Madam, I am not fond of meeting fools 
anywhere ,” we cannot help joining in the gen- 
eral laughter of the company to whom he 
speaks; and as the Doctor himself finally 
laughs and becomes cheerful and entertaining, 
we feel that it was only the bear in him that 
growled, — an honest beast, but sometimes very 
surly. 

As for his remarkable strictures upon Presby- 
terianism, his declaration that he preferred the 
Roman Catholic Church, his expressed hope 
that John Knox was buried in the highway, 
and his wish that a dangerous steeple in Edin- 
burgh might not be taken down because if it 
were let alone it might fall on some of the pos- 
terity of John Knox, which, he said, would be 
“no great matter,” — if when we read these 
things we remember that he was talking to his 
Scotch friend Boswell, we get a new idea of 
the audacity of the great man’s humour. I 
believe he even stirred up his natural high- 
churchism to rise rampant and roar vigor- 
ously, for the pleasure of seeing Boswell’s eyes 
stand out, and his neat little pigtail vibrate in 
dismay. 


290 


A STURDY BELIEVER 

There are many other sayings of Johnson’s 
which disclose a deeper vein of tolerance; such 
as that remark about the essential agreement 
and trivial differences of all Christians, and his 
warm commendation, on his dying bed, of the 
sermons of Dr. Samuel Clarke, a Dissenting 
minister. 

But even suppose we are forced to admit that 
Dr. Johnson was lacking in that polished liber- 
ality, that willingness to admit that every other 
man’s opinions are as good as his own, which 
we have come nowadays to regard as the chief 
of the theological virtues; even suppose we 
must call him “ narrow,” we must admit at the 
same time that he was “deep”; he had a pro- 
fundity of conviction, a sincerity of utterance 
which made of his religion something, as the 
Germans say, “to take hold of with your 
hands.” 

He had need of a sturdy belief. With that 
tempestuous, unruly disposition of his boiling 
all the time within him, living in the age of 
Chesterfield and Bolingbroke, fighting his way 
through the world amid a thousand difficulties 
and temptations, he had great need to get a 
firm grip upon some realities of religion and 
hold fast to them as things that were settled. 
His first conviction of the truth of Christianity 
came to him while he was at Oxford, through a 
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casual reading of Law’s Call to the Unconverted . 
There were some years after that, he tells us, 
when he was totally regardless of religion. 
But sickness and trouble brought it back, 
“and I hope,” says he, “that I have never lost 
it since.” 

He was not unwilling to converse with friends 
at fitting opportunities in regard to religious 
subjects, and no one who heard him could have 
remained long in doubt as to the nature of his 
views. There was one conversation in particu- 
lar, on the subject of the sacrifice of Christ, at 
the close of which he solemnly dictated to his 
friend a brief statement of his belief, saying 
finally, “The peculiar doctrine of Christianity 
is that of an universal sacrifice and a perpetual 
propitiation. Other prophets only proclaimed 
the will and the threatenings of God. Christ 
satisfied his justice.” Again, one calm, bright 
Sunday afternoon, when he was in a boat with 
some friends upon the sea (I think it was dur- 
ing his journey to the Hebrides,) he fell into 
discourse with Boswell about the fear of death, 
which was often very terrible to his mind. He 
would not admit that the close of life ought to 
be regarded with cheerfulness or indifference, or 
that a rational man should be as willing to leave 
the world as to go out of a show-room after he 
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has seen it. “No, sir,” said he, “there is no 
rational principle by which a man can die con- 
tented, but a trust in the mercy of God through 
the merits of Jesus Christ.” He was not 
ashamed to say that he was afraid to die. He 
assumed no braggadocio before the grave. He 
was honest with himself, and he felt that he 
needed all the fortitude of a religious faith to 
meet the hour of dissolution and the prospect 
of divine judgment without flinching. He could 
never have understood the attitude of men who 
saunter as unconcernedly and airily towards the 
day of judgment as if they were going to the 
play. 

But Johnson was by no means given to un- 
seasonable or unreasonable religious discourse. 
He had a holy horror of cant, and of unprofit- 
able controversy. He once said of a friend who 
was more loquacious than discreet, “Why, yes, 
sir; he will introduce religious discourse with- 
out seeing whether it will end in instruction 
and improvement, or produce some profane 
jest. He would introduce it in the company of 
Wilkes, and twenty more such” 

It was Dr. Johnson’s custom to keep a book 
of Prayers and Meditations for his own private 
use. These were printed after his death, and 
they reveal to us the sincerity of his inner life 
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as nothing else could do. Think of the old 
man kneeling down in his room before he began 
the painful labours of a studious day, and re- 
peating this prayer: — 

“ Against inquisitive and perplexing thoughts: 
O Lord, my Maker and Protector, who hast gra- 
ciously sent me into this world to work out my 
salvation, enable me to drive from me all such 
unquiet and perplexing thoughts as may mis- 
lead or hinder me in the practice of those 
duties which Thou hast required. When I 
behold the works of thy hands, and consider 
the course of thy providence, give me grace 
always to remember that thy thoughts are 
not my thoughts, nor thy ways my ways. And 
while it shall please Thee to continue me in 
this world, where much is to be done and little 
to be known, teach me by thy Holy Spirit to 
withdraw my mind from unprofitable and dan- 
gerous inquiries, from difficulties vainly curi- 
ous, and doubts impossible to be solved. Let 
me rejoice in the light which Thou hast im- 
parted; let me serve Thee with active zeal and 
humble confidence, and wait with patient ex- 
pectation for the time in which the soul Thou 
receivest shall be satisfied with knowledge. 
Grant this, O Lord, for Jesus Christ’s sake. 
Amen.” 


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A STURDY BELIEVER 

These are honest and sensible petitions. 
And the more a man knows, the more devoted 
he is to serious and difficult studies, the more 
he ought to feel the need of just such a divine 
defense and guidance. It is good to be kept 
on the track. It is wise to mistrust your own 
doubts. It is happy to be delivered from 
them. 

The fundamental quality of Dr. Johnson’s 
religion was the sense of reverence. He was 
never “ known to utter the name of God but 
on proper occasions and with due respect.” 
He approached the consideration of divine 
things with genuine solemnity, and could not 
tolerate sacred trifling or pious profanity. He 
was not ashamed to kneel where men could see 
him, although he never courted their notice; or 
to pray where men could hear him, although he 
did not desire their approbation any more than 
he feared their ridicule. 

There were grave faults and errors in his 
conduct. But no one had so keen a sense of 
their unworthiness as the man himself, who 
was bravely fighting against them, and sin- 
cerely lamenting their recurrence. They often 
tripped him and humiliated him, but they never 
got him completely down. He righted him- 
self and went lumbering on. He never sold 
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his heart to a lie, never confused the evil and 
the good. When he sinned he knew it and 
repented. It gives us confidence in his sin- 
cerity when we see him denying himself the 
use of wine because he was naturally prone to 
excess, and yet allowing it to his friends who 
were able to use it temperately. He was no 
puritan; and, on the other hand, he was no 
slipshod condoner of vice or suave preacher of 
moral indifference. He was a big, honest soul, 
trying hard to live straight along the line of 
duty and to do good as he found opportunity. 

The kindness and generosity of his heart 
were known to few save his intimate friends, 
and not always appreciated even by those who 
had most cause to be grateful to him. The 
poor broken-down pensioners with whom he 
filled his house in later years, and to whom he 
alluded playfully as his seraglio , were a constant 
source of annoyance. They grumbled perpet- 
ually and fought like so many cats. But he 
would not cast them off any more than he 
would turn out his favourite mouser, Hodge, 
for whom he used to “go out and buy oysters, 
lest the servants having that trouble should 
take a dislike to the poor creature.” He gave 
away a large part of his income in charity; and, 
what was still more generous, he devoted a con- 
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siderable portion of his time to counseling 
young and unsuccessful authors and, (note 
this,) reading their manuscripts. 

I suppose if one had been a poverty-stricken 
beginner at literature, in London of the eigh- 
teenth century, the best thing one could have 
done would have been to find the way to Dr. 
Johnson’s house and tell him how the case 
stood. If he himself had no money to lend, he 
would have borrowed it from some of his 
friends. And if he could not say anything en- 
couraging about the manuscripts, he would 
have been honest and kind enough to advise 
the unhappy aspirant to fame to prefer the life 
of a competent shoemaker to that of an incom- 
petent scribbler. 

Much of what was best in the character of 
Johnson came out in his friendships. He was 
as good a lover as he was a hater. He was loyal 
to a fault, and sincere, though never extrava- 
gant, in his admirations. 

The picture of the old man in his last illness, 
surrounded by the friends whom he had cher- 
ished so faithfully, and who now delighted to 
testify their respect and affection for him, and 
brighten his lingering days with every atten- 
tion, has little of the customary horror of a 
death-bed. It is strange indeed that he who 
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had always been subject to such a dread of 
dying should have found it possible to meet 
the hour of dissolution with such composure. 
His old friend Sir Joshua Reynolds comes in to 
bid him farewell, and Johnson makes three re- 
quests of him, — to forgive him thirty pounds 
which he had borrowed from him, to read the 
Bible, and never to use his pencil on a Sunday. 
Good petitions, which Sir Joshua readily 
granted, although we cannot help fearing that 
he occasionally forgot the last. 

“Tell me,” says the sick man to his physi- 
cian, “can I possibly recover? Give me a di- 
rect answer.” Being hard pressed. Dr. Brock- 
lesby confesses that in his opinion recovery is 
out of the question. “Then,” says Johnson, 
“I will take no more physick, not even my 
opiates : for I have prayed that I may render up 
my soul to God unclouded.” 

And so with kind and thoughtful words to 
his servant, and a “God bless you, my dear” 
to the young daughter of a friend who stood 
lingering at the door of his room, this sturdy 
old believer went out to meet the God whom 
he had tried so honestly to serve. His life was 
an amazing victory over poverty, sickness, and 
sin. Greatness alone could not have insured, 
nor could perseverance alone have commanded, 
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three of his good fortunes in this world: that 
Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait; that 
Boswell wrote his biography; and that His 
Wife said of him that “he was the most sen- 
sible man she had ever met . 55 


299 


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A PURITAN PLUS POETRY 























A PURITAN PLUS POETRY 
I 

FRIEND of mine, one of the Elder Book- 



men of Harvard, told me some twenty 
years ago that he had only once seen Ralph 
Waldo Emerson vexed out of his transcendental 
tranquillity and almost Olympian calm. It was 
a Sunday afternoon in Concord, and the phi- 
losopher had been drawn from his study by an 
unwonted noise in the house. On the back 
porch he found his own offspring and some 
children of the neighbours engaged in a romp- 
ing, boisterous game. With visible anger he 
stopped it, saying, “Even if you have no rever- 
ence for the day, you ought to have enough 
sense and manners to respect the traditions of 
your forefathers.” 

Emerson’s puritanism was in the blood. 
Seven of his ancestors were ministers of New 
England churches of the’ early type. Among 
them was Peter Bulkley, who left his comfort- 
able parish in Bedfordshire, England, to become 
the pastor of 4 4 the church in the wilderness” 
at Concord, Massachusetts; Father Samuel 


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Moody of Agamenticus, Maine, who was such 
a zealous reformer that he pursued wayward 
sinners even into the alehouse to reprove them; 
Joseph Emerson of Malden, a “heroic scholar,” 
who prayed every night that no descendant of 
his might ever be rich; and William Emerson, 
the patriot preacher, who died while serving 
in the army of the Revolution. These were 
verily “soldiers of the Lord,” and from them 
and women of like stamina and mettle, Emer- 
son inherited the best of puritan qualities: in- 
dependence, sobriety, fearless loyalty to con- 
science, strenuous and militant virtue. 

But he had also a super-gift which was not 
theirs. That which made him different from 
them, gave him a larger and more beautiful 
vision of the world, led him into ways of think- 
ing and speaking which to them would have 
seemed strange and perilous, (though in con- 
duct he followed the strait and narrow path,) 
— in short, that which made him what he was 
in himself and to countless other men, a seer, 
an inspirer, a singer of new light and courage 
and joy, was the gift of poetic imagination and 
interpretation. He was a puritan 'plus poetry. 

Graduating from Harvard he began life as a 
teacher in a Boston school and afterwards the 
minister of a Boston church. But there was 
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something in his temperament which unfitted 
him for the service of institutions. He was a 
servant of ideas. To do his best work he 
needed to feel himself entirely independent of 
everything except allegiance to the truth as 
God gave him to see it from day to day. The 
scholastic routine of a Female Academy irked 
him. The social distinctions and rivalries of 
city life appeared to him both insincere and 
tiresome. Even the mild formulas and regu- 
lations of a Unitarian church seemed to ham- 
per him. He was a come-outer; he wished to 
think for himself, to proclaim his own visions, 
to act and speak only from the inward impulse, 
though always with an eye to the good of others. 
So he left his parish in Boston and became a 
preacher at large to “these United States.” 
His pulpit was the lecture-platform; his little 
books of prose and verse carried his words to a 
still larger audience; no man in America during 
his life had a more extended or a deeper influ- 
ence; he became famous both as an orator and 
as a writer; but in fact he was always preach- 
ing. As Lamb said to Coleridge, “I never 
heard you do anything else.” 

The central word of all his discourse is Self- 
reliance, — be yourself, trust yourself, and fear 
not! But in order to interpret this rightly one 
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must have at least an inkling of his philosophy, 
which was profoundly religious and essentially 
poetical. He was a mystic, an intuitional 
thinker. He believed that the whole universe 
of visible things is only a kind of garment 
which covers the real world of invisible ideas 
and laws and principles. He believed also that 
each man, having a share in the Divine Reason 
which is the source of all things, may have a 
direct knowledge of truth through his own in- 
nate ideas and intuitive perceptions. Emer- 
son wrote in his diary, “The highest revelation 
is that God is in every man.” 

This way of thinking is called transcenden- 
talism, because it overleaps logic and scientific 
reasoning. It is easy to see how such a phi- 
losophy might lead unbalanced persons into 
wild and queer and absurd views and practices. 
And so it did when it struck the neighbourhood 
of Boston in the second quarter of the 19th 
Century, and began to spread from that sacred 
centre. 

But with these vagaries Emerson had little 
sympathy. His mysticism was strongly tinc- 
tured with common sense, (which also is of di- 
vine origin,) and his orderly nature recoiled 
from eccentric and irregular ways. Although 
for a time he belonged to the “Transcendental 
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A PURITAN PLUS POETRY 

Club,” he frequently said that he would not be 
called a transcendentalist, and at times he made 
fun, in a mild and friendly spirit, of the extreme 
followers of that doctrine. He held as strongly 
as any one that the Divine light of reason in 
each man is the guide to truth; but he held it 
with the important reservation that when this 
inner light really shines, free from passion and 
prejudice, it will never lead a man away from 
good judgment and the moral law. All through 
his life he navigated the transcendental sea 
safely, piloted by a puritan conscience, warned 
off the rocks by a keen sense of humour, and 
kept from capsizing by a solid ballast of New 
England prudence. 

He was in effect one of the most respected, 
sagacious, prosperous and virtuous villagers of 
Concord. Some slight departures from com- 
mon custom he tranquilly tested and as tran- 
quilly abandoned. He tried vegetarianism for a 
while, but gave it up when he found that it did 
him no good. He attempted to introduce do- 
mestic democracy by having the servants sit at 
table with the rest of the household, but was 
readily induced to abandon the experiment by 
the protest of his two sensible hired girls against 
such an inconvenient arrangement. He began 
to practise a theory that manual labour should 
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form part of the scholar’s life, but was checked 
by the personal discovery that hard work in 
the garden meant poor work in the study. 
“The writer shall not dig,” was his conclusion. 
Intellectual freedom was what he chiefly de- 
sired; and this he found could best be attained 
in an inconspicuous manner of living and dress- 
ing, not noticeably different from that of the 
average college professor or country minister. 

Here you see the man “in his habit as he 
lived,” (and as thousands of lecture-audiences 
saw him,) pictured in the old photograph which 
illustrates this chapter. Here is the familiar 
decor of the photographer’s studio: the curtain 
draped with a cord and tassel, the muslin 
screen background, and probably that hidden 
instrument of torture, the “head-rest,” behind 
the tall, posed figure. Here are the solemn 
“swallow-tail coat,” the conventional cravat, 
and the black satin waistcoat. Yet even this 
antique “carte de visite,” it seems to me, sug- 
gests something more and greater, — the im- 
perturbable, kindly presence, the noble face, 
the angelic look, the serene manner, the pene- 
trating and revealing quality of the man who 
set out to be “a friend to all who wished to live 
in the spirit.” 

Whatever the titles of his lectures , — Man 
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A PURITAN PLUS POETRY 

the Reformer , The Method of Nature , The Con- 
duct of Life , Fate, Compensation , Prudence , The 
Present Age, Society and Solitude, — his main 
theme is always the same, “ namely the infini- 
tude of the private man.” But this private 
man of Emerson’s, mark you, is linked by in- 
visible ties to all Nature and carries in his 
breast a spark of the undying fire which is of 
God. Hence he is at his best when he feels 
not only his personal unity but also his univer- 
sal community, when he relies on himself and 
at the same time cries 

“7 yield myself to the perfect whole .” 

This kind of independence is the truest form of 
obedience. 

The charm of Emerson’s way of presenting 
his thought comes from the spirit of poetry in 
the man. He does not argue, nor threaten, 
nor often exhort; he reveals what he has seen 
or heard, for you to make what you will of it. 
He relies less on syllogisms than on imagery, 
symbols, metaphors. His utterance is as in- 
spirational as the ancient oracle of Delphi, 
but he shuns the contortions of the priestess 
at that shrine. 

The clearness and symmetry of his sentences, 
the modulations of his thrilling voice, the 
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radiance of his fine features and his understand- 
ing smile, even his slight hesitations and pauses 
over his manuscript as he read, lent a singular 
attraction to his speech. Those who were mis- 
trustful of his views on theology and the 
church, listened to him with delight when he 
poetized on art, politics, literature, human 
society and the natural world. To the finest 
men and women of Amercia in the mid-Vic- 
torian epoch he was the lecturer par excellence , 
the intellectual awakener and liberator, the 
messenger calling them to break away from 
dull, thoughtless, formal ways of doing things, 
and live freely in harmony with the laws of 
God and their own spirit. They heard him 
gladly. 

I wonder how he would fare today, when lec- 
turers, male or female, have to make a loud 
noise to get a hearing. 


II 

Emerson’s books, prose and verse, remain 
with us and still live, — “the precious life-blood 
of a masterspirit, embalmed and treasured up 
on purpose to a life beyond life.” That they 
are companionable is proved by the way all 
sorts of companionable people love them. I 
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know a Pullman car conductor who swears by 
Emerson. A young French Canadian woods- 
man, (who is going to work his way through 
college,) told me the other day that he liked 
Emerson’s essays better than any other Eng- 
lish book that he had read. Restive girls and 
boys of the 4 ‘new generation” find something in 
him which appeals to them; reading farmers of 
New England and the West prefer him to 
Plato; even academic professors and politicians 
qualifying for statesmen feel his stimulating 
and liberating influence, although (or perhaps 
because) he sometimes says such hard things 
about them. I guess that nothing yet written 
in America is likely to live longer than Emer- 
son’s best work. 

His prose is better known and more admired 
than his verse, for several reasons: first, be- 
cause he took more pains to make the form of it 
as perfect as he could; second, because it has a 
wider range and an easier utterance; third, 
because it has more touches of wit and of fa- 
miliarity with the daily doings of men; and fi- 
nally, because the majority of readers probably 
prefer prose for silent reading, since the full 
charm of good verse is revealed only in reading 
aloud. 

But for all that, with Emerson, (as with a 
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writer so different as Matthew Arnold,) I find 
something in the poems which is not in the 
essays, — a more pure and subtle essence of what 
is deepest in the man. Poetry has a power of 
compression which is beyond prose. It says 
less and suggests more. 

Emerson wrote to the girl whom he after- 
wards married: “I am born a poet, — of a low 
class without doubt, but a poet. . . . My 
singing, to be sure, is very husky and is for the 
most part in prose. Still I am a poet in the 
sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the har- 
monies that are in the soul and in matter, and 
specially of the correspondence between them.” 
This is penetrating self-criticism. That he was 
“of a low class” as poet is more than doubtful, 
— an error of modesty. But that his singing 
was often “husky” cannot be denied. He 
never troubled himself to learn the art of song. 
The music of verse, in which Longfellow gained 
such mastery, and Lowell and Whittier had 
such native gifts, is not often found in Emer- 
son’s poetry. His measures rarely flow with 
freedom and harmony. They are alternately 
stiff and spasmodic, and the rhymes are some- 
times threadbare, sometimes eccentric. Many 
of his poems are so condensed, so tight-packed 
with thought and information that they seem 
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to labour along like an overladen boat in a 
choppy sea. For example, this: 

“ The journeying atoms , 

Primordial wholes , 

Firmly draw , firmly drive , 

By their animate poles." 

Or this: 

“ Puny man and scentless rose 
Tormenting Pan to double the dose" 

But for these defects of form Emerson as 
poet makes ample amends by the richness 
and accuracy of his observation of nature, by 
the vigorous flight of his imagination, by the 
depth and at times the passionate controlled 
intensity of his feeling. Of love-poetry he has 
none, except the philosophical. Of narrative 
poetry he has practically none, unless you 
count such brief, vivid touches as, — 

“By the rude bridge that arched the flood. 

Their flag to April's breeze unfurled. 

Here once the embattled farmers stood. 

And fired the shot heard round the world" 

But his descriptive pieces are of a rare beauty 
and charm, truthful in broad outline and deli- 
cate detail, every flower and every bird in its 
right colour and place. Walking with him 
you see and breathe New England in the light 
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of early morn, with the dew sparkling on the 
grass and all the cosmic forces working under- 
neath it. His reflective and symbolic poems, 
like Each and All , The Problem , Forerunners , 
Days , The Sphinx, are full of a searching and 
daring imaginative power. He has also the 
genius of the perfect phrase. 

“ The frolic architecture of the snow." 

“Earth proudly wears the Parthenon , 

As the test gem upon her zone." 

“ The silent organ loudest chants 
The Master's requiem." 

“Music pours on mortals 
Its beautiful disdain. " 

“ Over the winter glaciers , 

I see the summer glow. 

And through the wild-piled snowdrift 
The warm rose-buds below." 

“I thenceforward and long after. 

Listen for their harp-like laughter. 

And carry in my heart, for days. 

Peace that hallows rudest ways." 

His Threnody , written after the early death 
of his first-born son, has always seemed to me 
one of the most moving elegies in the English 
tongue. His patriotic poems, especially the 
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Concord Ode , are unsurpassed as brief, lyrical 
utterances of the spirit of America. In cer- 
tain moods, when the mind is in vigour and the 
windows of far vision open at a touch, Emer- 
son’s small volume of Poems is a most com- 
panionable book. 

As his prose sometimes intrudes into his 
verse and checks its flow, so his poetry often 
runs over into his prose and illuminates it. 
What could be more poetic in conception than 
this sentence from his first book. Nature? “If 
the stars should appear but one night in a 
thousand years, how would men believe and 
adore and preserve for many generations the 
remembrance of the city of God which had 
been shown!” 

Emerson’s Essays are a distillation of his 
lectures. His way of making these was singu- 
lar and all his own. It was his habit to keep 
note-books in which he jotted down bits of ob- 
servation about nature, stray thoughts and 
comparisons, reflections on his reading, and 
striking phrases which came to him in medita- 
tion or talk. Choosing a subject he planted 
it in his mind and waited for ideas and illus- 
trations to come to it, as birds or insects to a 
flower. When a thought appeared he followed 
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it, “as a boy might hunt a butterfly,” and when 
it was captured he pinned it in his “thought- 
book.” No doubt there were mental laws at 
work all the time, giving guidance and direc- 
tion to the process of composition which seemed 
so irregular and haphazard. There is no lack 
of vital unity in one of Emerson’s lectures or 
essays. It deals with a single subject and 
never gets really out of sight of the proposition 
with which it begins. Yet it seldom gives a 
complete, all-round view of it. It is more like 
a series of swift and vivid glimpses of the same 
object seen from different stand-points, a col- 
lection of snap-shot pictures taken in the course 
of a walk around some great mountain. 

From the pages of his note-books he gathered 
the material for one of his lectures, selecting 
and arranging it under some such title as Fate, 
Genius, Beauty, Manners, Duty, The Anglo- 
Saxon, The Young American, and giving it 
such form and order as he thought would be 
most effective in delivery. If the lecture was 
often repeated, (as it usually was,) the material 
was frequently rearranged, the pages were 
shifted, the illustrations changed. Then, after 
it had served its purpose, the material was 
again rearranged and published in a volume of 
Essays. 


316 


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It is easy to trace in the essays the effects of 
this method of writing. The material is drawn 
from a wide range of reading and observation. 
Emerson is especially fond of poetry, philosophy 
and books of anecdote and biography. He 
quotes from Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, 
George Herbert, Wordsworth, Plutarch, Grimm, 
St. Simon, Swedenborg, Behmen the mystic, 
Plato, and the religious books of the East. His 
illustrations come from far and near. Now 
they are strange and remote, now homely and 
familiar. The Zodiac of Denderah; the Savoy- 
ards who carved their pine-forests into toys; 
the lustrum of silence which Pythagoras made 
his disciples keep; Napoleon on the Bellerophon 
watching the drill of the English soldiers; the 
Egyptian legend that every man has two pair 
of eyes; Empedocles and his shoe; the flat 
strata of the earth; a soft mushroom pushing 
up through the hard ground; — all these allu- 
sions and a hundred more are found in the same 
volume. On his pages, close beside the Parthe- 
non, St. Paul’s, the Sphinx, iEtna and Vesu- 
vius, you will read of the White Mountains, 
Monadnock, Katahdin, the pickerel-weed in 
bloom, the wild geese honking across the sky, 
the chickadee singing in the face of winter, the 
Boston State-house, Wall Street, cotton-mills, 
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railroads, Quincy granite, and so forth. Noth- 
ing is too far away to seem real to him, nothing 
too near to seem interesting and valuable. 
There is an abundance, sometimes a supera- 
bundance, of material in his essays, not always 
well-assorted, but all vivid and suggestive. 

The structure of the essay, the way of putting 
the material together, does not follow any fixed 
rule or system. Yet in most cases it has a 
well-considered and suitable form; it stands 
up; it is architecturally built, though the art 
is concealed. I once amused myself trying to 
analyze some of the essays, and found that 
many of the best ones have a definite theme, 
like a text, and follow a regular plan of develop- 
ment, with introduction, discussion, and con- 
clusion. In some cases Emerson does not dis- 
dain the “ heads and horns” of the old-fash- 
ioned preacher, and numbers his points “ first,” 
“ second,” “ third,” — perhaps even “ fourth.” 
But this is rare. For the most part the essays 
do not seem to be constructed but to grow. 
They are like conversations with the stupid 
things left out. They turn aside from dull 
points, and omit connecting links, and follow 
an attractive idea wherever it may lead. They 
seldom exhaust a subject, but they usually 
illuminate it. 


318 


A PURITAN PLUS POETRY 

“The style is the man,” and in this case it is 
well suited to his material and his method. It 
is brilliant, sparkling, gemlike. He has great 
freedom in the choice of words, using them 
sometimes in odd ways and not always cor- 
rectly. Generally his diction is made up of 
terse, pungent Anglo-Saxon phrases, but now 
and then he likes to bring in a stately word of 
Greek or Latin origin, with a telling effect of 
contrast. Most of his sentences are short and 
clear; it is only in the paragraph that he is 
sometimes cloudy. Every essay is rich in epi- 
grams. If one reads too much of a style like 
this, the effect becomes fatiguing. You miss 
the long, full, steady flow of sentences with 
varied cadence and changing music. 

Emerson’s river is almost all rapids. The 
flash and sparkle of phrase after phrase tire me 
after a while. But for a short voyage nothing 
could be more animated and stimulating. I 
read one essay at a time and rise refreshed. 

But the secret of Emerson’s power, (to 
change the figure,) is in the wine which he 
offers, not the cup into which he pours it. His 
great word, — “self-reliance,” — runs through all 
his writing and pervades all that he says. At 
times it is put in an extreme form, and might 
lead, if rashly followed, to intellectual conceit 
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COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 


and folly. But it is balanced by other words, 
no less potent, — self-criticism, modesty, con- 
sideration, prudence, and reverence. He is an 
aspiring, hopeful teacher of youth; correcting 
follies with a sharp wit; encouraging noble 
ambitions; making the face of nature luminous 
with the glow of poetic imagination; and ele- 
vating life with an ideal patriotism and a broad 
humanity. In all his writing one feels the 
serene, lofty influence of a sane and chastened 
optimism, the faith which holds, amid many 
appearances which are dark, mysterious and 
terrifying, that Good is stronger than Evil and 
will triumph at last everywhere. 

Read what he says in the essay called Com- 
pensation: 6 6 There is no penalty to virtue; no 
penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions 
of being. In a virtuous action I properly am; 
in a virtuous act I add to the world; I plant 
into deserts conquered from Chaos and Noth- 
ing, and see the darkness receding on the limits 
of the horizon. There can be no excess to love, 
none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these 
attributes are considered in the purest sense. 
The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an 
Optimism, never a Pessimism.” 

This is the note that brings a brave joy to the 
ear of youth. Old age gladly listens to the 
320 


A PURITAN PLUS POETRY 

same note in the deeper, quieter music of 
Emerson’s poem, Terminus . 

“As the bird trims her to the gale, 

I trim myself to the storm of time, 

1 man the rudder, reef the sail. 

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at 'prime: 

6 Lowly faithful, banish fear. 

Right onward drive unharmed; 

The port, well worth the cruise, is near , 

And every wave is charmed. 9 99 


321 




AN ADVENTURER IN A 
VELVET JACKET 




AN ADVENTURER IN A VELVET 
JACKET 


rpHUS gallantly he appears in my mind’s eye 
A when I pause in rereading one of his books 
and summon up a fantasm of the author, — 
Robert Louis Stevenson, gentleman adventurer 
in life and letters, his brown eyes shining in a 
swarthy face, his lean, long-enduring body 
adorned with a black-velvet jacket. 

This garment is no disguise but a symbol. 
It is short, so as not to impede him with en- 
tangling tails. It is unconventional, as a pro- 
test against the tyranny of fashion. But it is 
of velvet, mark you, to match a certain nice- 
ness of choice and preference of beauty, — yes, 
and probably a touch of bravura, — in all its 
wearer’s vagaries. ’Tis like the silver spurs, 
broad sombrero and gay handkerchief of the 
thoroughbred cowboy, — not an element of the 
dandiacal, but a tribute to romance. Strange 
that the most genuine of men usually have a 
bit of this in their composition; your only in- 
curable poseur being the fellow who affects 
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never to pose and betrays himself by his atti- 
tude of scorn. 

Of course, Stevenson did not always wear this 
symbolic garment. In fact the only time I met 
him in the flesh his clothes had a discouraging 
resemblance to those of the rest of us at the 
Authors Club in New York. And a few months 
ago, when I traced his “footprints on the sands 
of time” at Waikiki beach, near Honolulu, the 
picture drawn for me by those who knew him 
when he passed that way, was that of a lank, 
bare-footed, bright-eyed, sun-browned man who 
daundered along the shore in white-duck trou- 
sers and a shirt wide open at the neck. But 
the velvet jacket was in his wardrobe, you may 
be sure, ready for fitting weather and occasion. 
He wore it, very likely, when he went to beard 
the Honolulu colourman who was trying to 
“do” his stepson-in-law in the matter of a bill 
for paints. He put it on when he banqueted 
with his amiable but bibulous friend, King Kal- 
akaua. You can follow it through many, if 
not most, of the photographs which he had 
taken from his twentieth to his forty-fourth, 
and last, year. And in his style you can almost 
always feel it, — the touch of distinction, the 
ease of a native elegance, the assurance of a 
well-born wanderer, — in short, the velvet jacket. 

326 


AN ADVENTURER 

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson began the 
adventure of life in a decent little house in 
Howard Place, Edinburgh, on November 13 , 
1850 . He completed it on the Samoan island 
of Upolu in the South Seas, December 3 , 1894 , 
— completed it, I think, for though he left his 
work unfinished he had arrived at the port of 
honour and the haven of happy rest. 

His father, and his father’s father, were en- 
gineers connected with the Board of Northern 
Lights. This sounds like being related to the 
Aurora Borealis; and indeed there was some- 
thing of mystery and magic about Stevenson, 
as if an influence from that strange midnight 
dawn had entered his blood. But as a matter 
of fact the family occupation was nothing more 
uncanny than that of building and maintain- 
ing lighthouses and beacons along the Scottish 
coast, a profession in which they won consider- 
able renown and to which the lad himself was 
originally assigned. He made a fair try at it, 
and even won a silver medal for an essay on 
improvements in lighthouses. But the calling 
did not suit him, and he said afterward that he 
gained little from it except “properties for 
some possible romance, or words to add to my 
vocabulary.” 

This lanky, queer, delicate, headstrong boy 
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was a dreamer of dreams, and from youth des- 
perately fond of writing. He felt himself a 
predestinated author, and like a true Scot 
toiled diligently to make his calling and elec- 
tion sure. 

But there was one thing for which he cared 
more than for writing, and that was living. He 
plunged into it eagerly, with more zest than 
wisdom, trying all the games that cities offer, 
and learning some rather disenchanting lessons 
at a high price. For in truth neither his physi- 
cal, nor (as he later discovered) his moral, 
nature was suited to the sowing of wild oats. 
His constitution was one of the frailest ever 
exposed to the biting winds and soaking mists 
of the North British Boston. Early death 
seemed to be written in his horoscope. But 
an indomitable spirit laughs at dismal predic- 
tions. Robert Louis Stevenson, (as he now 
called himself, velvet- jacketing his own name,) 
was not the man to be easily snuffed out by 
weak lungs or wild weather. Mocking at 
“bloody Jack” he held fast to life with grim, 
cheerful, grotesque courage; his mother, his 
wife, his trusty friends, heartened him for the 
combat; and he succeeded in having a wider 
experience and doing more work than falls to 
the lot of many men in rudely exuberant health. 
328 


AN ADVENTURER 

To do this calls for a singular kind of bravery, 
not inferior to, nor unlike, that of the good 
soldier who walks with Death undismayed. 

Undoubtedly Stevenson was born with a 
Wanderlust . 

“ My mistress was the open road 
And the bright eyes of danger” 

111 health gave occasion and direction to many 
voyages and experiments, some of which bet- 
tered him, while others made him worse. As a 
bachelor he roamed mountains afoot and trav- 
elled rivers in his own boat, explored the pur- 
lieus and sublittorals of Paris, London, and 
Edinburgh, lodged “on the seacoast of Bohe- 
mia,” crossed the ocean as an emigrant, and 
made himself vagrantly at home in California 
where he married the wife “the great Artificer 
made for him.” They passed their honeymoon 
in a deserted miner’s cabin, and then lived 
around, in Scotland, the Engadine, Southern 
France, Bournemouth, the Adirondacks, and on 
a schooner among the South Sea Islands, bring- 
ing up at last in the pleasant haven of Vailima. 
On all these distant roads Death pursued him, 
and, till the last ten years, Poverty was his com- 
panion. Yet he looked with keen and joyful 
eyes upon the changing face of the world and 
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into its shadowy heart without trembling. He 
kept his spirit unbroken, his faith unquenched 
even when the lights burned low. He counted 
life 


“just a stuff 

To try the souVs strength on and educe the man ” 


He may have stumbled and sometimes fallen, 
things may have looked black to him; but he 
never gave up, and in spite of frailties and 
burdens, he travelled a long way, — upward. 
Through all his travels and tribulations he kept 
on writing, writing, writing, — the very type of 
a migratory author. He made his first appear- 
ance in a canoe. The log of this journey. An 
Inland Voyage on French Rivers , published in 
1878, was a modest, whimsical, charming debut 
in literature. In 1879 he appeared again, and 
this time with a quaint companion. Travels 
with a Donkey in the Cevennes is one of the most 
delightful, uninstructive descriptions of a jour- 
ney ever written in English. It contains no 
practical information but plenty of pleasure 
and profit. I do not envy the reader who can 
finish it without loving that obstinate little 
mouse-coloured Modestine, and feeling that 
she is one of the best-drawn female characters, 
of her race, in fiction. 

From this good, quiet beginning his books 
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AN ADVENTURER 


followed rapidly, and (after Treasure Island , 
that incomparable boys’ book for men,) with 
growing popularity among the judicious, the 
“gentle readers,” who choose books not because 
they are recommended by professors or adver- 
tised in department stores, but because they 
are really well written and worth reading. 

It is difficult to classify Stevenson’s books, 
perhaps just because they are migrants, bor- 
derers. Yet I think a rough grouping, at least 
of his significant works, may be made. There 
are five volumes of travels; six or seven vol- 
umes of short stories; nine longer novels or 
romances; three books of verse; three books of 
essays; one biography; and one study of South 
Sea politics. This long list lights up two vital 
points in the man: his industry and his versa- 
tility. 

“A virtue and a vice,” say you? Well, that 
may be as you choose to take it, reader. But if 
you say it in a sour or a puritanical spirit, 
Stevenson will gaily contradict you, making 
light of what you praise and vaunting what 
you blame. 

Industry? Nonsense! Did he not write An 
Apology for Idlers? Yet unquestionably he was 
a toiler; his record proves it. Fleeing from one 
land to another to shake off his implacable 
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. enemy; camping briefly in strange places; often 
laid on his back by sickness and sometimes told 
to “move on” by Policeman Penury; collecting 
his books by post and correcting his proofs in 
bed; he made out to produce twenty-nine vol- 
umes in sixteen years, — say 8,000 pages of 300 
words, each, — a thing manifestly impossible 
without a mort of work. But of this he thought 
less than of the fact that he did it, as a rule, 
cheerfully and with a high heart. Herein he 
came near to his own ideal of success: “To be 
honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to 
spend a little less, to make upon the whole a 
family happier for his presence, to renounce 
when that shall be necessary and not to be em- 
bittered, to keep a few friends, but these with- 
out capitulation, — above all, on the same grim 
condition, to keep friends with himself — here is 
a task for all that a man has of fortitude and 
delicacy.” Of his work I think he would have 
said that he stuck to it, first, because he needed 
the money that it brought in, and second, be- 
cause he enjoyed it exceedingly. With this he 
would have smiled away the puritan who 
wished to pat him on the back for industry. 

That he was versatile, turned from one sub- 
ject to another, tried many forms of his art, 
and succeeded in some better than in others, he 
332 


AN ADVENTURER 

would have admitted boldly — even before those 
critics who speak slightingly of versatility as if 
it marked some inferiority in a writer, whereas 
they dislike it chiefly because it gives them ex- 
tra trouble in putting him into his precise pig- 
eonhole of classification. Stevenson would have 
referred these gentlemen to his masters Scott 
and Thackeray for a justification. His versa- 
tility was not that of a weathercock whirled 
about by every wind of literary fashion, but 
that of a well-mounted gun which can be turned 
towards any mark. He did not think that be- 
cause he had struck a rich vein of prose story- 
telling he must follow that lead until he had 
worked it or himself out. He was a prospector 
as well as a miner. He wished to roam around, 
to explore things, books, and men, to see life 
vividly as it is, and then to write what he 
thought of it in any form that seemed to him 
fit, — essay, or story, or verse. And this he did, 
thank God, without misgiving, and on the 
whole greatly to our benefit and enjoyment. 

I am writing now of the things which make 
his books companionable. That is why I have 
begun with a thumb-nail sketch of the man in 
the velvet jacket who lives in them and in his 
four volumes of letters, — the best English let- 
ters, it seems to me, since Lamb and Thack- 
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COMPANIONABLE BOOKS 


eray. That also is why I have not cared to 
interrupt this simple essay by telling which of 
his works strike me as comparative failures, 
and giving more or less convincing reasons why 
certain volumes in my “ collective edition” are 
less worn than others. 

’Tis of these others that I wish to speak, — 
the volumes whose bindings are like a comfort- 
able suit of old clothes and on whose pages 
there are pencil-marks like lovers’ initials cut 
upon the bark of friendly trees. What charm 
keeps them alive and fresh, in an age when 
most books five years old are considered out of 
date and everything from the unspacious times 
of Queen Victoria is cordially damned? What 
manner of virility is in them to evoke, and to 
survive, such a flood of “ Stevensoniana ” ? 
What qualities make them still welcome to so 
wide a range of readers, young and old, simple 
and learned, — yes, even among that fair and 
capricious sex whose claim to be courted his 
earlier writings seem so lightly (or prudently) 
to neglect? 

I 

Over and above the attraction of his pervad- 
ing personality, I think the most obvious 
charm of Stevenson’s books lies in the clear, 
334 


AN ADVENTURER 

vivid, accurate and strong English in which 
they are written. Reading them is like watch- 
ing a good golfer drive or putt the ball with 
clean strokes in which energy is never wanting 
and never wasted. He does not foozle, or 
lose his temper in a hazard, or brandish his 
brassy like a war-club. There is a grace of 
freedom in his play which comes from practice 
and self-control. 

Stevenson describes (as far as such a thing is 
possible) the way in which he got his style. 
“All through my boyhood and youth,” says he, 
“I was known and pointed out for the pattern 
of an idler, and yet I was always busy on my 
own private end, which was to learn to write.” 
He traces with gusto, and doubtless with as 
much accuracy as can be expected in a map 
drawn from memory, the trails of early admira- 
tion which he followed towards this goal. His 
list of “authors whom I have imitated” is most 
entertaining: Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sir 
Thomas Browne, Defoe, Hawthorne, Mon- 
taigne, Baudelaire, Obermann. In another es- 
say, on “Books Which Have Influenced Me,” 
he names The Bible , Hamlet , As You Like It, 
King Lear , Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, The Pil- 
grim’s Progress , Leaves of Grass, Herbert Spen- 
cer’s books, Lewes’s Life of Goethe , the Medita - 
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tions of Marcus Aurelius, the poems of Words- 
worth, George Meredith’s The Egoist , the essays 
of Thoreau and Hazlitt, Mitford’s Tales of Old 
Japan , — a strange catalogue, but not incoher- 
ent if you remember that he is speaking now 
more of their effect upon his way of thinking 
than of their guidance in his manner of writing, 
— though in this also I reckon he learned some- 
thing from them, especially from the English 
Bible. 

Besides the books which he read, he carried 
about with him little blank-books in which he 
jotted down the noteworthy in what he saw, 
heard, or imagined. He learned also from pen- 
less authors, composers without a manuscript, 
masters of the viva-voce style, like Robert, the 
Scotch gardener, and John Todd, the shepherd. 
When he saw a beggar on horseback, he cared 
not where the horse came from, he watched the 
rascal ride. If an expression struck him “for 
some conspicuous force, some happy distinc- 
tion,” he promptly annexed it; — because he 
understood it, it was his. 

In two separate essays, each of which he calls 
“A Gossip,” he pays tribute to “the bracing in- 
fluence of old Dumas,” and to the sweeping 
power and broad charm of Walter Scott, “a 
great romantic— an idle child,” the type of easy 
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writers. But Stevenson is of a totally different 
type, though of a kindred spirit. He is the 
best example in modern English of a careful 
writer. He modelled and remodelled, touched 
and retouched his work, toiled tremendously. 
The chapter on Honolulu in The Wrecker, was 
rewritten ten times. His essays for Scribner’s 
Magazine passed through half a dozen revi- 
sions. 

His end in view was to bring his language 
closer to life, not to use the common language 
of life. That, he maintained, was too diffuse, 
too indiscriminate. He wished to condense, to 
distil, to bring out the real vitality of language. 
He was like Sentimental Tommy in Barrie’s 
book, willing to cogitate three hours to find the 
solitary word which would make the thing he 
had in mind stand out distinct and unmistak- 
able. What matter if his delay to finish his 
paper lost him the prize in the competition? 
Tommy’s prize was the word; when he had 
that his work was crowned. 

A willingness to be content with the wrong 
colour, to put up with the word which does not 
fit, is the mark of inferior work. For example, 
the author of Trilby , wishing to describe a cer- 
tain quick, retentive look, speaks of the painter’s 
“'prehensile eye.” The adjective startles, but 
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does not illuminate. The prehensile quality 
belongs to tails rather than to eyes. 

There is a modern school of writers fondly 
given to the cross-breeding of adjectives and 
nouns. Their idea of a vivid style is satisfied 
by taking a subject which belongs to one region 
of life and describing it in terms drawn from 
another. Thus if they write of music, they use 
the language of painting; if of painting, they 
employ the terminology of music. They give 
us pink songs of love, purple roars of anger, and 
gray dirges of despair. Or they describe the 
andante passages of a landscape, and the minor 
key of a heroine’s face. 

This is the extravagance of a would-be 
pointed style which mistakes the incongruous 
for the brilliant. Stevenson may have had 
something to do with the effort to escape from 
the polished commonplace of an English which 
admitted no master earlier than Addison or 
later than Macaulay. He may have been a 
leader in the hunting of the unexpected, strik- 
ing, pungent word. But for the excesses and 
absurdities of this school of writing in its de- 
cadence, he had no liking. He knew that if 
you are going to use striking words you must be 
all the more careful to make them hit the mark. 

He sets forth his theory of style in the essay 
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AN ADVENTURER 

called A Humble Remonstrance . It amounts to 
this: First, you shall have an idea, a controlling 
thought; then you shall set your words and 
sentences marching after it as soldiers follow 
their captain; and if any turns back, looks the 
other way, fails to keep step, you shall put him 
out of the ranks as a malingerer, a deserter at 
heart. “The proper method of literature,” 
says he, “is by selection, which is a kind of 
negative exaggeration.” But the positive ex- 
aggeration, — the forced epithet, the violent 
phrase, the hysterical paragraph, — he does not 
allow. Hence we feel at once a restraint and 
an intensity, a poignancy and a delicacy in his 
style, which make it vivid without ever becom- 
ing insane even when he describes insanity, as 
he does in The Merry Men , Olalla , and Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His words are focussed 
on the object as with a burning-glass. They 
light it up; they kindle it; but they do not 
distort it. 

Now a style like this may have its occasional 
fatigues: it may convey a sense of over-careful- 
ness, of a choice somewhat too meticulous, — to 
use a word which in itself illustrates my mean- 
ing. But after all it has a certain charm, espe- 
cially in these days of slipshod, straddling Eng- 
lish. You like to see a man put his foot down 
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in the right place, neither stumbling nor swag- 
gering. The assurance with which he treads 
may be the result of forethought and concen- 
tration, but to you, reading, it gives a feeling of 
ease and confidence. You follow him with 
pleasure because he knows where he is going 
and has taken pains to study the best way of 
getting there. 

Take a couple of illustrations from the early 
sketches which Stevenson wrote to accompany 
a book of etchings of Edinburgh, — hack work, 
you may call them; but even hack work can 
be done with a nice conscience. 

Here is the Edinburgh climate: “The weather 
is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and un- 
genial in summer, and a downright meteoro- 
logical purgatory in spring. The delicate die 
early, and I, as a survivor among bleak winds 
and plumping rains, have been sometimes 
tempted to envy them their fate.” 

Here is the Scottish love of home: (One of 
the tall “lands,” inhabited by a hundred fami- 
lies, has crumbled and gone down.) “How 
many people all over the world, in London, 
Canada, New Zealand, could say with truth, 
‘The house I was born in fell last night’ !” 

Now turn to a volume of short stories. Here 
is a Hebridean night, in The Merry Men: 

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“Outside was a wonderful clear night of stars, 
with here and there a cloud still hanging, last 
stragglers of the tempest. It was near the top 
of the flood, and the Merry Men were roaring 
in the windless quiet.” 

Here is a sirocco in Spain: “It came out of 
malarious lowlands, and over several snowy 
sierras. The nerves of those on whom it blew 
were strung and jangled; their eyes smarted 
with the dust; their legs ached under the bur- 
den of their body; and the touch of one hand 
upon another grew to be odious.” 

Now take an illustration from one of his very 
early essays, Notes on the Movements of Young 
Children , printed in 1874. Here are two very 
little girls learning to dance: “In these two, 
particularly, the rhythm was sometimes broken 
by an excess of energy, as though the 'pleasure of 
the music in their light bodies could endure no 
longer the restraint of the regulated dance” 

These examples are purposely chosen from 
tranquil pages; there is nothing far-fetched or 
extraordinary about them; yet I shall be sorry 
for you, reader, if you do not feel something 
rare and precious in a style like this, in which 
the object, however simple, is made alive with 
a touch, and stands before you as if you saw it 
for the first time. 


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II 

Tusitala, — “ Teller of Tales,” — was the name 
which the South Sea Islanders gave to Steven- 
son; and he liked it well. Beginning as an 
essayist, he turned more and more, as his life 
went on, to the art of prose fiction as that in 
which he most desired to excel. It was in this 
field, indeed, that he made his greatest advance. 
His later essays do not surpass his earlier ones 
as much as his later stories excel his first at- 
tempts. 

Here I conceive my reader objecting: Did 
not Treasure Island strike twelve early in the 
day? Is it not the best book of its kind in 
English? 

Yes, my fellow Stevensonian, it is all that 
you say, and more, — of its kind it has no supe- 
rior, so far as I know, in any language. But the 
man who wrote it wrote also books of a better 
kind, — deeper, broader, more significant, and 
in writing these he showed, in spite of some re- 
lapses, a steadily growing power which promised 
to place him in the very highest rank of English 
novelists. 

The Master of Ballantrae , maugre its defects 
of construction, has the inevitable atmosphere 
of fate, and the unforgettable figures of the two 
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brothers, born rivals. The second part of David 
Balfour is not only a better romance, but also 
a better piece of character drawing, than the 
first part. St. Ives, which was left unfinished, 
may have been little more than a regular 
“sword-and-cloak” story, more choicely writ- 
ten, perhaps, than is usual among the followers 
of “old Dumas.” Rut Stevenson’s other un- 
finished book, Weir of Hermiston, is the torso of 
a mighty and memorable work of art. It has 
the lines and the texture of something great. 

Why, then, was it not finished? Ask Death. 

Lorna Doone was written, at forty-four years: 
The Scarlet Letter at forty-six: The Egoist at 
fifty-one: Tess of the UUrbervilles at fifty-one. 
Stevenson died at forty-four. But considera- 
tions of what he might have done, (and disputes 
about the insoluble question,) should not hinder 
us from appraising his actual work as a teller of 
tales which do not lose their interest nor their 
charm. 

He had a theory of the art of narration which 
he stated from time to time with considerable 
definiteness and inconsiderable variations. It 
is not obligatory to believe that his stories were 
written on this theory. It is more likely that 
he did the work first as he wanted to do it, and 
then, like a true Scot, reasoned out an explana- 
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tion of why he had done it in just that way. 
But even so, his theory remains good as a com- 
ment on the things that he liked best in his own 
stories. Let us take it briefly. 

His first point is that fiction does not, and 
cannot, compete with real life. Life has a 
vastly more varied interest because it is more 
complex. Fiction must not try to reproduce 
this complexity literally, for that is manifestly 
impossible. What the novelist has to do is to 
turn deliberately the other way, and seek to 
hold you by simplifying and clarifying the 
material which life presents. He wins not by 
trying to tell you everything, but by telling you 
that which means most in the revelation of 
character and in the unfolding of the story. Of 
necessity he can deal only with a part of life, 
and that chiefly on the dramatic side, the 
dream side; for a life in which the ordinary, in- 
dispensable details of mere existence are omitted 
is, after all, more or less dream-like. There- 
fore, the story-teller must renounce the notion 
of making his story a literal transcript of even 
a single day of actual life, and concentrate his 
attention upon those things which seem to him 
the most real in life, — the things that count. 

Now a man who takes this view of fiction, if 
he excels at all, will be sure to do so in the short 
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story, a form in which the art of omission is at 
a high premium. Here, it seems to me, Steven- 
son is a master unsurpassed. Will o’ the Mill 
is a perfect idyl; Markheim, a psychological 
tale in Hawthorne’s manner; Olalla , a love- 
story of tragic beauty; and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
Hyde , in spite of its obvious moving-picture 
artifice, a parable of intense power. 

Stevenson said to Graham Balfour: “ There 
are three ways of writing a story. You may 
take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may 
take a character and choose incidents and situ- 
ations to develop it, or lastly you may take a 
certain atmosphere and get actions and persons 
to express and realize it. I’ll give you an ex- 
ample — The Merry Men. There I began with 
the feeling of one of those islands on the west 
coast of Scotland, and I gradually developed 
the feeling with which that coast affected me.” 
This, probably, is somewhat the way in which 
Hawthorne wrote The House of the Seven Gables; 
yet I do not think that is one of his best roman- 
ces, any more than I think The Merry Men one 
of Stevenson’s best short stories. It is not 
memorable as a tale. Only the bits of descrip- 
tion live. The Treasure of Franchard , light and 
airy as it is, has more of that kind of reality 
which Stevenson sought. Therefore it seems 
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as if his third “way of writing a story ” were 
not the best suited to his genius. 

The second way, — that in which the plot 
links and unfolds the characters, — is the path 
on which he shows at his best. Here the gentle- 
man adventurer was at ease from the moment 
he set forth on it. In Treasure Island he raised 
the dime novel to the level of a classic. 

It has been charged against Stevenson’s 
stories that there are no women in them. To 
this charge one might enter what the lawyers 
call a plea of “confession and avoidance.” 
Even were it true, it would not necessarily be 
fatal. It may well be doubted whether that 
primitive factor which psychologists call “sex- 
interest” plays quite such a predominant, per- 
petual, and all-absorbing part in real life as 
that which neurotic writers assign to it in their 
books. But such a technical, (and it must be 
confessed, somewhat perilous,) defense is not 
needed. There are plenty of women in Steven- 
son’s books, — quite as many, and quite as de- 
lightful and important as you will find in the 
ordinary run of life. Marjory in Will o’ the 
Mill is more lovable than Will himself. Olalla 
is the true heroine of the story which bears 
her name. Catriona and Miss Grant, in the 
second part of David Balfour , are girls of whom 
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it would be an honour to be enamoured; and 
I make no doubt that David, (like Stevenson) 
was hard put to it to choose between them. 
Uma, in The Beach of Falesa, is a lovely insu- 
lated Eve. The two Kirsties, in Weir of Iier- 
miston, are creatures of intense and vivid wo- 
manhood. It would have been quite impos- 
sible for a writer who had such a mother as 
Stevenson’s, such a friend of youth as Mrs. 
Sitwell, such a wife as Margaret Vandegrift, to 
ignore or slight the part which woman plays in 
human life. If he touches it with a certain 
respect and pudor, that also is in keeping with 
his character, — the velvet jacket again. 

The second point in his theory of fiction is 
that in a well-told tale the threads of narrative 
should converge, now and then, in a scene which 
expresses, visibly and unforgettably, the very 
soul of the story. He instances Robinson 
Crusoe finding the footprint on the beach, and 
the Pilgrim running from the City of Destruc- 
tion with his fingers in his ears. 

There are many of these flash-of-lightning 
scenes in Stevenson’s stories. The duel in The 
Master of Ballantrae where the brothers face 
each other in the breathless winter midnight 
by the light of unwavering candles, and Mr. 
Henry cries to his tormentor, “I will give you 
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every advantage, for I think you are about to 
die.” The flight across the heather, in Kid- 
napped, when Davie lies down, forspent, and 
Alan Breck says, “Very well then, I’ll carry 
ye”; whereupon Davie looks at the little man 
and springs up ashamed, crying “Lead on. 
I’ll follow!” The moment in Olalla when the 
Englishman comes to the beautiful Spanish 
mistress of the house with his bleeding hand to 
be bound up, and she, catching it swiftly to her 
lips, bites it to the bone. The dead form of 
Israel Hands lying huddled together on the 
clean, bright sand at the bottom of the lagoon 
of Treasure Island . Such pictures imprint 
themselves on memory like seals. 

The third point in Stevenson’s theory is, that 
details should be reduced to a minimum in 
number and raised to a maximum in signifi- 
cance. He wrote to Henry James, (and the 
address of the letter is amusing,) “How to es- 
cape from the besotting particularity of fiction? 
‘Boland approached the house; it had green 
doors and window blinds; and there was a 
scraper on the upper step.’ To hell with Ro- 
land and the scraper!” Many a pious reader 
would say “thank you” for this accurate ex- 
pression of his sentiments. 

But when Stevenson sets a detail in a story 
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AN ADVENTURER 

you see at once that it cannot be spared. Will 
o’ the Mill, throwing back his head and shout- 
ing aloud to the stars, seems to see “a momen- 
tary shock among them, and a diffusion of 
frosty light pass from one to another along the 
sky.” When Markheim has killed the anti- 
quarian and stands in the old curiosity shop, 
musing on the eternity of a moment’s deed, — 
first one and then another, with every variety 
of pace and voice, — one deep as the bell from a 
cathedral turret, another ringing on its treble 
notes the prelude of a waltz, — the clocks began 
to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.” 
Turning over the bit of paper on which “the 
black spot,” the death-notice of the pirates, 
has been scrawled with charcoal, Jim Hawkins 
finds it has been cut from the last page of a 
Bible, and on the other side he reads part of a 
verse from the last chapter of the Revelation: 
Without are dogs and murderers . 

There is no “besotting particularity” in such 
details as these. On the contrary they illus- 
trate the classic conception of a work of art, in 
which every particular must be vitally con- 
nected with the general, and the perfection of 
the smallest part depends upon its relation to 
the perfect whole. Now this is precisely the 
quality, and the charm, of Stevenson’s stories, 
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short or long. He omits the non-essential, but 
his eye never misses the significant. He does 
not waste your time and his own in describing 
the coloured lights in the window of a chemist’s 
shop where nothing is to happen, or the quaint 
costume of a disagreeable woman who has no 
real part in the story. That kind of realism, 
of local colour, does not interest him. But he 
is careful to let you know that Alan Breck wore 
a sword that was much too long for him; that 
Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, gave an im- 
pression of deformity without any nameable 
malformation, and bore himself “with a sort 
of murderous mixture of timidity and bold- 
ness”; that John Silver could use his wooden 
leg as a terrible weapon; that the kitchen of 
the cottage on Aros was crammed with rare 
incongruous treasures from far away; and that 
on a certain cold sunny morning “the black- 
birds sung exceeding sweet and loud about the 
House of Durisdeer, and there was a noise of 
the sea in all the chambers.” Why these 
trivia? Why such an exact touch on these de- 
tails? Because they count. 

Yet Stevenson’s tales and romances do not 
give — at least to me — the effect of over-elabora- 
tion, of strain, of conscious effort; there is 
nothing affected and therefore nothing tedious 
350 


AN ADVENTURER 

in them. They move; they carry you along 
with them; they are easy to read; one does not 
wish to lay them down and take a rest. There 
is artifice in them, of course, but it is a thor- 
oughly natural artifice, — as natural as a clean 
voice and a clear enunciation are to a well-bred 
gentleman. He does not think about them; 
he uses them in his habit as he lives. Tusitala 
enjoys his work as a teller of tales; he is at 
home in it. His manner is his own; it suits 
him; he wears it without fear or misgiving, — 
the velvet jacket again. 

Ill 

Of Stevenson as a moralist I hesitate to write 
because whatever is said on this point is almost 
certain to be misunderstood. On one side are 
the puritans who frown at a preacher in a vel- 
vet jacket; on the other side the pagans who 
scoff at an artist who cares for morals. Yet 
surely there is a way between the two extremes 
where an artist-man may follow his conscience 
with joy to deal justly, to love mercy, and to 
walk humbly with his God. And having caught 
sight of that path, though he may trace it but 
dimly and follow it stumbling, surely such a 
man may say to his fellows, “This is the good 
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way; let us walk in it.” Not one of the great 
writers who have used the English language, so 
far as I know, has finished his career without 
wishing to moralize, to teach something worth 
learning, to stand in the pulpit of experience 
and give an honest message to the world. Ste- 
venson was no exception to this rule. He 
avowed the impulse frankly when he said to 
William Archer, “I would rise from the dead 
to preach.” 

In his stories we look in vain for “morals” 
in the narrow sense, — proverbs printed in italics 
and tagged on to the tale like imitation oranges 
tied to a Christmas tree. The teaching of his 
fiction is like that of life, diffused through the 
course of events and embodied in the develop- 
ment of characters. But as the story unfolds 
we are never in doubt as to the feelings of the 
narrator, — his pity for the unfortunate; his 
scorn for the mean, the selfish, the hypocritical; 
his admiration for the brave, the kind, the 
loyal and cheerful servants of duty. Never 
at his lightest and gayest does he make us 
think of life as a silly farce; nor at his sternest 
and saddest does he leave us disheartened, 
“having no hope and without God in the 
world.” Behind the play there is a meaning, 
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AN ADVENTURER 

and beyond the conflict there is a victory, and 
underneath the uncertainties of doubt there is 
a foothold for faith. 

I like what Stevenson wrote to an old 
preacher, his father’s friend. “Yes, my father 
was a ‘distinctly religious man,’ but not a 
pious. . . . His sentiments were tragic; he 
was a tragic thinker. Now granted that life is 
tragic to the marrow, it seems the proper ser- 
vice of religion to make us accept and serve in 
that tragedy, as officers in that other and com- 
parable one of war. Service is the word, active 
service in the military sense; and the religious 
man — I beg pardon, the pious man — is he who 
has a military joy in duty, — not he who weeps 
over the wounded.” 

This is the point of view from which Steven- 
son writes as a novelist; you can feel it even in 
a romance as romantic as Prince Otto; and in 
his essays, where he speaks directly and in the 
first person, this way of taking life as an ad- 
venture for the valourous and faithful comes 
out yet more distinctly. The grace and vigour 
of his diction, the pointed quality of his style, 
the wit of his comment on men and books, add 
to the persuasiveness of his teaching. I can 
see no reason why morality should be drab and 
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dull. It was not so in Stevenson’s character, 
nor is it so in his books. That is one reason 
why they are companionable. 

“There is nothing in it [the world],” wrote he 
to a friend, “but the moral side — but the great 
battle and the breathing times with their re- 
freshments. I see no more and no less. And 
if you look again, it is not ugly, and it is filled 
with promise.” 


354 






